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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/06/19, SPi
THE TESTIMONY OF SENSE

The Testimony of Sense

Empiricism and the Essay from
Hume to Hazlitt
TIM MILNES
1
1
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Contents
Preface vii
Epigraph ix
Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 1

1. Self and Intersubjectivity 23
2. The Subject of Trust 75
3. The Conversable Intellect 109
4. Essays in Experience 145
5. Romantic Essayism 191
Conclusion 253
Bibliography 255
Index 273
Preface
This study addresses what intellectual historians such as Leslie Stephen and Élie
Halévy once registered as a lull in British intellectual history: a sharp reduction in
the volume of epistemological debate between the mid-eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. Halévy, for instance, claims that between David Hartley and
James Mill, English thought passed ‘through a period of standstill.’1 This change
coincided with what Uttara Natarajan describes as ‘a generic development almost
unnoticed in English philosophy: the migration of philosophical discourse from
the eighteenth-century “treatise,” which had hitherto been chiefly its realm, into the
more informal, more intimate writings of the belletrist.’2 In this study, I suggest
that these phenomena are related. British thought did not so much stand still in this
period as switch paradigms, at least for a time. This is evident in two connected
events: a shift in the philosophical current (the ‘socialization’ of British empiricism,
largely through the epistemology of the Scottish Enlightenment) and the develop-
ment of a literary genre (the familiar essay). These converged to produce a remarkable
turn in the relationship between philosophy and literature between the publication
of Hume’s Treatise in 1740 and the flourishing of the Romantic familiar essay in
the 1820s. What Halévy registered as a hiatus is really a swerve away from systematic
epistemology and towards a kind of essayism, involving a corresponding change in
philosophical style and vocabulary.
The argument of this book is threefold. Its first claim is that, around the middle
of the eighteenth century, a model of intersubjectivity emerges as the cornerstone of
a counterdiscourse to the scientific empiricism that, since Descartes, had been
based upon the epistemological binary of subject and object. Exemplified by Hume’s
‘easy’ philosophy, this counterdiscourse seeks to reground epistemological corres-
pondence in social correspondence; above all, it bases knowledge upon the circula-
tion of trust. The second claim that the book makes stems from its understanding
of the ways in which trust is regulated and policed within late Enlightenment and
Romantic culture. Accordingly, it focuses upon the genre that, since Addison, had
become a metaphor for philosophical conversability: the essay. The rise of the essay
in the eighteenth century, like the contemporary concern with trust, reveals the
period’s preoccupation with the ways in which intellectual life was being shaped
by economic change. Itself a reaction against the partition of cultural labour, the
essay nonetheless falls prey to specialization, subdividing into two subgenres: what
I loosely term its ‘closed’ and ‘open’ forms. In the former—its apodictic or Baconian
1 Élie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1972), p. 434. See also Leslie Stephen, History
of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (1902), p. 2: Stephen finds that ‘[t]he influence . . . of
Hume’s teaching is . . . obscure because chiefly negative. It produced in many minds a languid scepti-
cism which cared little for utterance . . . . ’
2 Uttara Natarajan, ‘The Veil of Familiarity: Romantic Philosophy and the Familiar Essay’, Studies
in Romanticism 42, no. 1 (2003), p. 30.
viii Preface
mode—the essay is viewed as extending the logical and experimental procedures of

the scientific Enlightenment; its overriding objective is the removal of error and
uncertainty. In its familiar or Montaignean mode, however, the essay seeks to bring
about a performative critique of instrumental reason, a critique that—while essen-
tially nostalgic in its desire for unsystematic accomplishment, its subordination of
theory to practice—presents a pragmatic counterthrust to Enlightenment ration-
ality. In this form, the essay’s principal end is the establishment of intersubjective
norms based upon style, consensus, and sentiment.
Efforts to ‘open’ up the essay (to make it performative rather than apodictic in
its operations) reflect a broader endeavour in some quarters to bring ‘philosophy’
and ‘literature’ into a productive dialogue at a time when these categories were
being subjected to increasing amounts of disciplinary rigour. Such efforts encom-
pass attempts to reconcile ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (Bacon and Montaigne, Newton
and Cicero) through a literary style that is both intimate and authoritative. The ways
in which this reconciliation is conducted is the subject of the third major claim of
this book. In its closing chapters, I examine the relationships between Neoclassical
essayists such as Hume and Johnson and their Romantic successors such as Charles
Lamb and William Hazlitt by considering their varying conceptions of literary
‘performance.’ I examine how these variations, in turn, lie behind their differing
perceptions of what is at stake in the work of the familiar essayist. For Hume and
Johnson, the performance of virtue represents and enacts the social solidarity that
either underpins conventional norms (Hume) or reflects fundamental moral truths
(Johnson); the task of the familiar essayist is to maintain this solidarity. For the
Romantic writer, however, the fiction of familiarity is, for political and cultural
reasons, both more tenuous and more urgent. Accordingly, the essayist’s primary
burden becomes one of establishing social and epistemological norms through the
exercise of imaginative power. In the essays of Lamb and Hazlitt, the enactment of
familiar conversation creates an experience of singularity and enchantment that is
linked to an essentially idealized and nostalgic form of sociability. Consequently,
while the epistemological and cultural mission of the Neoclassical essayist is to
consolidate truth and value, the task of the Romantic essayist is to produce them.
How many things of slight probability there are, testified to by trustworthy

people, which, if we cannot be convinced of them, we should at least leave
in suspense! For to condemn them as impossible is to pretend, with rash
presumption, to know the limits of possibility.1
There is no doubt an analogy between the evidence of sense and the evidence
of testimony. Hence we find in all languages the analogical expressions of the
testimony of sense, of giving credit to our senses, and the like. But there is a real
difference between the two, as well as a similitude. In believing upon testimony,
we rely upon the authority of a person who testifies: But we have no such
authority for believing our senses.2
1 Michel de Montaigne, ‘It is Folly to Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity’,
The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. Donald M. Frame (1958), p. 133.
2 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), p. 275.
Introduction
Empiricism Made Easy
Opening his 1742 essay, ‘Of Essay-Writing’, David Hume distinguishes between
the ‘learned ’ and the ‘conversible’ spheres of intellect:
The elegant Part of Mankind, who are not immers’d in the animal Life, but employ
themselves in the Operations of the Mind, may be divided into the learned and
conversible. The Learned are such as have chosen for their Portion the higher and more
difficult Operations of the Mind, which require Leisure and Solitude, and cannot
be brought to Perfection, without long Preparation and severe Labour. The conversible
World join to a sociable Disposition, and a Taste of Pleasure, an Inclination to the
easier and more gentle Exercises of the Understanding.1
This division, decried by Hume as ‘the great Defect of the last Age’, was one that he
laboured to overcome, styling himself as ‘a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from
the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation.’2 Hume’s courteous and
diplomatic ‘Ambassador’ would later shape the more confident authorial persona
of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and the Enquiry Concerning
the Principles of Morals (1751), both of which seek to effect a dialogue between the
abstruse but ‘accurate and abstract’ philosophy epitomized by Aristotle and the ‘easy
and humane’ arts of rhetoric, sentiment and taste practised by Cicero.3 Since
‘nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race’,
Hume surmises, the truest philosophy will also be that which proves to be most
useful, involving a fruitful exchange between the exacting methods of the ‘anatomist’
and the figurative skills of the ‘painter.’4
1 David Hume, ‘Of Essay-Writing’, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary 1741–77, ed. Eugene F. Miller
(1985), p. 533.
2 Hume, Essays pp. 534–5.
3 Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of
Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (1975), p. 9.
4 Hume, Enquiries pp. 9–10. Hume had been far less confident about reconciling these roles while
working on the Treatise of Human Nature. Responding to Francis Hutcheson’s claim that the third book
of the Treatise ‘wants a certain Warmth in the Cause of Virtue’, Hume argues that ‘[o]ne may consider
it [i.e. the mind] either as an Anatomist or as a Painter; either to discover its most secret Springs &
Principles or to describe the Grace & beauty of its Actions. I imagine it impossible to conjoin these
two Views.’ (‘To Frances Hutcheson’, 17 September 1739, letter 13 of The Letters of David Hume, ed.
J.Y.T. Greig, vol. 1 [1932], p. 32). See also Susan Manning, ‘Literature and Philosophy’, The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism, eds. H.B. Nisbet, Claude Rawson, vol. 4 (1997), p. 588: Manning notes
that ‘[t]he opposition of the “anatomist” and the “painter”, and the possibility of bringing them
together in writing, constantly unites the concerns of philosophy and literary criticism in the eighteenth
century.’ For a thorough analysis of the painter/anatomist analogy in the context of Hume’s relation
to Hutcheson and his followers, see M.A. Stewart, ‘Two Species of Philosophy: The Historical
2 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy
Hume presents his attempt to reconcile the most valuable elements of Aristotelian
and Ciceronian traditions as a corrective to his earlier Treatise of Human Nature
(1739–41), in which his youthful dedication to Aristotelian abstruseness had made
for a distinctly un-easy manner and a tone that veered between breezy overconfidence,
irony, and melancholy.5 From a modern perspective, it is tempting to read Hume’s
attempts to assert a measure of control over his speculative activities as an episode
in the struggle between literature and philosophy—a contest, as Mark Edmundson
observes, that was already ancient in Plato’s time.6 Drawing disciplinary boundaries,
however, can be a hazardous undertaking, and nowhere more so than in the crucible
of the Enlightenment, where both poetry and philosophy are apt to swing between
the didactic and the pragmatic. Accordingly, in thinking about the tensions between
Hume’s ‘painter’ and ‘anatomist’, it is useful to keep another distinction in play, one
that Stanley Fish borrows from Richard Lanham. Lanham distinguishes between
two intellectual postures, which, he claims, have characterized Western thought
throughout its history: those represented by the species ‘homo rhetoricus’ (rhetorical
man) and ‘homo seriosus’ (serious man). In Lanham’s words, while homo seriosus
‘possesses a central self, an irreducible identity’, homo rhetoricus ‘is an actor; his reality
public, dramatic’, whose lowest common denominator in life ‘is a social situation.’7
Fish and Lanham’s distinction is about as sweeping as they come, and bears more
than a passing resemblance to Nietzsche’s characterization of the ‘man of reason’
and the ‘man of intuition.’8 Nonetheless, it usefully describes a tension that exists
within the work of Hume, one that cuts across the fledgling disciplinary boundaries
of modern philosophy, rhetoric, and literature.9 Moreover, it addresses an issue
that many intellectual historians tend to overlook: the point at which questions
of intellectual substance and debate are determined by matters of literary form and
style. Consequently, while the contributions of scholars such as Israel and Rasmussen
have proved invaluable to our understanding of ‘radical’ and ‘pragmatic’ currents
in Enlightenment thought, they leave unexamined the question of the extent to
which intellectual positions depend, in addition to their conceptual frameworks,
upon the rhetorical techniques and literary strategies of the texts through which they
Significance of the First Enquiry’, Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry,
ed. Peter Millican (2002), pp. 67–95. I return to this issue in Chapter 4.
5 See the ‘Advertisement’ to the first Enquiry, which claims that in the latter volume, ‘some negligences
in his former reasoning and more in the expression, are, he hopes, corrected.’ (p. 2).
6 Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry (1995), p. 1.
7 Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary
and Legal Studies (1989), pp. 482–3.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, The Norton Anthology of Theory &
Criticism, eds. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (2010), p. 773: Nietzsche describes the man of reason as
‘fearful of intuition’, ‘unartistic’, and ‘guided by concepts and abstractions’ in his efforts to be ‘as free
as possible of pain’, while the man of intuition is ‘unreasonable’, ‘filled with scorn for abstraction’, and
gaining through his intuition ‘a constant stream of brightness’.
9 Other commentators have drawn similar comparisons. In The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume
(1994), p. 160, Adam Potkay suggests that Hume ‘may indeed be read as the type of Lanham’s homo
rhetoricus: pragmatic, shy of absolute convictions, and opposed to any type of zealousness’. See also
Leo Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (1989), p. 25: Damrosch contrasts
Hume’s ‘homo rhetoricus’, with Samuel Johnson’s ‘homo seriosus’.
are expounded.10 Hume’s writing is crucial to this issue because of the fundamentally
rhetorical way in which he first triggers and then responds to a crisis within empiri-
cism. Having assumed the guise of an Aristotelian/Newtonian homo seriosus so that
he can demonstrate the inescapability of philosophical scepticism, Hume switches
roles, taking on the persona of a Ciceronian homo rhetoricus and exchanging the
dominions of learning for those of conversation. Hume does this not to nullify
scepticism, but to alter the context in which it is understood and evaluated. As he
observed, a truly ‘Academic’ scepticism is sceptical even of its own doubts, since ‘[t]he
reflections of philosophy are too subtile and distant to take place in common life, or
eradicate any affection. The air is too fine to breathe in, where it is above the
winds and clouds of the atmosphere.’11 Overcoming scepticism meant, in a sense,
not overcoming it; it meant changing the metaphors that governed philosophical
thinking. In the Treatise, Hume’s reaction to sceptical paralysis had been to vacillate
between the sociability of urban life, in which he is ‘absolutely and necessarily
determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life’,
and the study, where he ‘cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with
the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government,
and the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern
me.’12 In his essays and in the Enquiries, however, Hume exchanges evasion for
transformation: in these works, the complexion of philosophy fundamentally
alters, becoming not literature, exactly, but an ‘easier’ and more ‘sociable’ mode
of discourse.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Exploring some of the consequences of this transformation, both for Hume and
for those writing in his wake, forms one of the three principal tasks of this book.
At this point I should note that, while Hume’s shadow is the longest cast by any
10 See Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins
of Modern Democracy (2010), p. 16: Israel’s conception of ‘Radical Enlightenment’, defined as ‘a set of
basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality, individual
liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority
from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state’ (p. vii) is funda-
mentally political rather than epistemological in construction, and consequently of limited use here.
Nonetheless, Israel locates Hume squarely in the camp of the reactionary, Moderate Enlightenment,
noting that his scepticism became a ‘useful philosophical resource against egalitarian and democratic
ideas’. Similarly political in its approach is Dennis C. Rasmussen’s account of Hume and Smith’s
‘nonfoundationalist form of liberalism’ in The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of
Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire (2013). Liberalism, he claims, ‘emphasized the importance of
context in the formulation of moral standards’, ‘stressed the limits and fallibility of human understand-
ing’, and ‘saw people as inherently social and sought . . . to unite them . . . in commerce’ (p. 4). While
this account is broadly in line with the picture presented here, Rasmussen, like Israel, does not focus
on the significance of ‘social empiricism’ and its wider implications for the relationship between litera-
ture and philosophy as forms of writing.
11 David Hume, ‘The Sceptic’, Essays, p. 172.
12 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental
Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, ed. P.H. Nidditch (1978), pp. 269–70.
writer over the concerns of this study, it is not my purpose to present a complete
and comprehensive account of his career and thought. In pursuing its argument,
the current study has been obliged to cut its coat according to its cloth. For example,
Hume’s work on politics and religion, while of unquestionable significance for
intellectual history, falls outside the interests of the present volume, and so readers
who bring to it an expectation of finding a full narrative of Hume’s intellectual
development are bound to be disappointed. Instead, I have tried to highlight and
explore the vital importance of one leading aspect of Hume’s thought (the socialization
of reason) for the development of the familiar essay.
Focusing upon this feature of Hume’s thinking is justified both by its significance
and by the surprising extent to which it has been overlooked. Since Norman Kemp
Smith’s depiction of a non-sceptical, realist Hume, much of the debate over his
philosophical legacy has concentrated upon the contested idea of ‘naturalism.’13
Comparatively less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which the
naturalized, social epistemologies of Hume and Reid instigate a pragmatic turn in
eighteenth-century empiricism. I argue that this turn is associated with a persistent
tension in eighteenth-century thought between Newtonian and Ciceronian models
of rationality: in other words, between an objective, plenary system of knowledge
and an accumulation of essayistic insights into virtue and the practicalities of
living a good life. Accordingly, in this study I will characterize the Humean strategy
as one that effects a transition from a model of thought based upon objectivity
(i.e. upon an epistemological binary of subject/object) to one that is based upon an
epistemologically radical idea of intersubjectivity. By downgrading ‘correspondence’
theories of truth and meaning, which tend to treat experience as a form of mental
representation, Hume moves away from the Lockean picture of a punctual subject
ivity constituted by a manifold of atomized experiences (ideas and impressions) and
underwritten by a providential rationality. In its place, he revives an older model of
‘experience’ as based in trial and experiment.14 As the definitions of ‘experience’,
‘empiricism’, and their cognate terms in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary reveal, this
latter notion, which prioritizes practice rather than phenomena, was still current
at the time; in turn, it is associated with a heightened awareness of the role of
communicative action in knowledge formation. Once epistemological relations
are reformulated in terms of social relationships, the most pressing questions that
arise relate not to objective truths but to the status of the norms and bonds that regu-
late the community of knowledge. This ultimately produces a concern with what
might be considered as the social a priori of knowledge: rational accommodation,
trust, and testimony. Consequently, the line between trusting persons and trusting
the ‘testimony’ of sense begins to blur.
13 See Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume: A Critical Study of its Origins and
Central Doctrines (2005).
14 See also John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (1982), p. 45: Sitter
claims that between the Treatise and Enquiries Hume’s theory of knowledge underwent ‘an important
change of focus away from the supposed atoms of experience to an experiencing mind, actively grasp-
ing its world’.
For Hume, the intersubjective, trusting intellect is the communicative intellect;

reason itself is based upon communication. The background to this assumption is
a peculiarly Scottish insistence that society, conceived as a set of interdependent
institutions and behaviours, precedes rationality—a conviction that, in turn, directs
Enlightenment debate towards the pragmatic aspects of language. As will be seen,
Hume’s account of promises and Thomas Reid’s interest in the illocutionary
dimension of language contribute to the development of a performative conception
of the speech-act situation—indeed, Reid’s linguistic theory challenges the whole
epistemological enterprise, replacing it with a hermeneutics of perception that
ultimately rests upon trust. Hume’s conventionalist account of meaning, meanwhile,
feeds into broader developments in eighteenth-century linguistics, culminating in
the gradual detachment of language from the idea of mental ‘contents’ and a
reappraisal of the relationship between language, thought, and reality. As Nicholas
Phillipson observes, ‘[f ]or Hume, the story of making judgements was a story about
human beings’ encounters with common life and . . . that was a matter of language.’15
Against the Lockean idea that reference is achieved via the use of arbitrary signs,
Hume argues that reference is always underdetermined by the referent: language,
like reason, is fundamentally conventional. It is this claim that would ultimately
encourage attempts by Tooke, Burke, Bentham, and Dugald Stewart to engineer a
shift from meaning as ‘aggregative’ to meaning as contextual or ‘propositional’.
Foregrounding questions of performance in turn refocuses philosophical atten-
tion upon issues of style and manner. Thanks to Hume, literary form itself becomes
a philosophical issue. As Michael Prince observes, it was a ‘given for Enlightenment
authors . . . that style is substance, that political, theological, and philosophical
polemics are carried out as much by how one writes as by what one writes.’16 This
brings me to the second of this study’s main claims, which is that the protean and
polyphonic genre of the ‘familiar’ essay comes to be seen by some philosophical
writers as an important tool for creating and sustaining intersubjective consensus.
For Hume and many subsequent writers, the familiar essay, with its amenability to
tentative, unmethodical improvisation and friendly conversation, offers a kind of
literary embodiment for reason, based on custom, habit, and sentiment.17 And yet,
at the same time, its somatic character and lack of determinate form means that the
essay is more liable than other genres (such as the novel) to be pulled in contrary
directions in the struggle between learning and conversation, between the epistemo-
logical models of Newton and Cicero. Adapting Adorno’s account of the essay as ‘the
critical form par excellence’, I discuss the tensions between the ‘closed’, systematic,
or apodictic essay and more ‘open’, familiar or performative forms. I also explore
15 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Polites, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century

Scottish Culture’, Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (1987), p. 237.
16 Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the
Novel (1996), p. 136.
17 Hume published the Essays, Moral and Political in 1741–2. In addition, the first Enquiry origin-
ally appeared under the title Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
the causes and consequences of the genre’s division into its formal (academic) and
experimental (familiar) varieties during this period.18
Answering this question will involve examining Enlightenment and Romantic
perceptions of the familiar essay as a self-consciously amphibious genre, one that is
neither ‘pure’ literature nor philosophy, but which incorporates elements of both.
It might be considered that the familiar essay’s tendency to present its subject (and
its author’s subjectivity) as something that is performed rather than established or
given indicates that the genre fully flourishes only with the advent of Romanticism.
Indeed, it could be argued that what distinguishes the essays of Charles Lamb
and William Hazlitt from those of precursors such as Hume and Johnson is not
so much their philosophical ‘content’ as the fact that they make engagement
with philosophical problems dependent upon questions of feeling, personality,
and manner. In the book’s third main line of inquiry, however, I argue that these
Romantic-performative strategies are ones that are shared with essayists across the
‘long’ eighteenth century. What distinguishes the Neoclassical from the Romantic
essayist is not performativity per se but what is at stake in the performance of essay-
ing. For the former, the overriding priority is to maintain social norms by policing
public discourse; accordingly, the language game engaged by the familiar essay
necessitates that certain normative structures are presupposed. In Hume, for instance,
such structures are determined by custom and reinforced by the exhibition of
courteous manners; in Johnson, they form part of an objective moral order and so
are less vulnerable to changes in ‘acceptable’ social habits. In both cases, however,
it is assumed that the reader cannot fully appreciate the performance of the author
without already sharing a great deal of their ‘common’ background of beliefs.
In other words, what is epistemologically at stake for the Neoclassical familiar essayist
is the status of a truth whose verifiability is fundamentally (for Hume) or practically
(for Johnson) a practical and intersubjective affair.
This Ciceronian and social conception of literary truth contrasts with that of
later essayists such as Lamb and Hazlitt. The gesture of the Romantic familiar essay
is based upon a very different form of cultural logic. In philosophical Romanticism,
the unification of style and substance is underwritten by an ideal presence, whether
this is figured (as it is, for instance, in Hazlitt) in terms of the formative power
of imagination, or (alternatively, in the case of Lamb) in relation to a borderline,
twilight territory of enchanted consciousness. The philosophical preconditions of this
strategy had already been established in Germany during the closing years of the
eighteenth century. In the pages of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s
Athenaeum, transcendental logic was deployed to underwrite the epistemological
conditions for staking performances of individual power, insight, or whimsicality
upon the prerogative of the author’s imagination. According to this logic, the ‘truth’
in relation to which the Romantic familiar essay situates itself is underwritten by
18 T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, New German Critique 32 (1984), p. 166. As I discuss in
Chapter 4, the essay is a genre that tends to resist all attempts at classification. See also Clifford Siskin,
System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (2016), p. 33: Siskin identifies the essay as the main com-
petitor genre to ‘system’ in Enlightenment epistemology until the two forms begin to merge around
the end of the eighteenth century.
the idea of a transcendentally postulated but unattainable unification of form and

content. While neither Lamb nor Hazlitt explicitly endorses this Romantic logic,
it remains embedded in their writing tacitly as a proleptic ideal, one that confers
upon their essayistic performances, at least potentially, the autotelic status of
‘Literature’. For Hume and Johnson, however, such a consummation was incon-
ceivable: literary language did not aspire to transcend everyday human experience;
rather, it confirmed the unity and integrity of shared norms through the practical
performance of social virtues and manners. Consequently, as will be seen, the
Neoclassical familiar essay operates without the support of the ideal imaginative
presence posited by the Romantics, staking its normative and epistemic status
instead upon the less secure footing of the intersubjective fictions of belief that
Hume had uncovered at the foundations of knowledge.
HUME AND THE ‘DISEASE OF THE LEARNED’
This discovery had initially dismayed Hume. The belletristic confidence with which
his essays reinforce the social stability of truth belies an early uneasiness. Indeed, it
is possible to see in his idea of an easeful and essayistic empiricism, based upon virtues
of character and sociability, the determination of a mature writer to overcome the
philosophical awkwardness of the vacillating performances of the Treatise. The
rhetorical dissonances of the latter work are foreshadowed by Hume’s earlier, less
formal writings, in particular the 1734 letter to Dr Arbuthnot, described by Kemp
Smith as ‘the most important of all Hume’s extant letters.’19 Written a few months
before settling in France prior to completing the Treatise, the unsent letter estab-
lishes the template for much of Hume’s later work by deploying narrative and
rhetorical techniques in order to exert control over philosophical problems that
threaten to unsettle or even overwhelm the thinker. In doing so, it reveals Hume’s
early dissatisfaction with the apodictic aspirations of philosophy and his tentative
efforts to construct an alternative: an empiricism based upon intersubjectivity,
trust, and style.
The letter begins by recounting Hume’s youthful impatience with the disputes
of philosophers and critics. Having decided that ancient moral philosophy suffered
from the ‘Inconvenience’ of being ‘entirely Hypothetical, & depending more upon
Invention than Experience’, the young Hume became convinced that all that
was needed in reasoning was ‘to throw off all Prejudices.’20 This conviction drove
him ‘to seek out some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht’, until at
around the age of eighteen, ‘there seem’d to be open’d up to me a new Scene of
19 Kemp Smith, David Hume, p. 14. Recent studies have cast doubt on whether Arbuthnot was the
intended recipient. See John P. Wright, ‘Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume’s Letter to
Physician’, Hume Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): pp. 125–41. Wright suggests that Hume was instead writ-
ing to George Cheyne, author of The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as
Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. (1733). However,
even Wright admits that the evidence for this is ‘not definitive’ (p. 125).
20 David Hume, ‘To [Dr George Cheyne]’, [March or April 1734], letter 3 of Letters, vol. 1, p. 16.
Thought, which transported me beyond Measure [. . .].’21 Hume’s elation, however,

lasts only a few months. By the beginning of September 1729, as he recalls, ‘all my
Ardor seem’d in a moment to be extinguisht’, to be replaced by a ‘Coldness’ which
‘remain’d for nine Months.’22 This nine-month period of lassitude marks the onset
of a malady of reflection, of overthinking, the main symptom of which is a ‘Desertion
of the Spirit’ so severe that it is accompanied by physical symptoms:23
At last about Aprile 1730, when I was 19 Years of Age, a Symptom, which I had notic’d
a little from the beginning, increased considrably . . . a Ptyalism or Watryness in the
mouth. Upon my mentioning it to my Physician, he laught at me, & told me I was
now a Brother, for that I had fairly got the Disease of the Learned. Of this he found
great Difficulty to preswade me, finding in myself nothing of that lowness of Spirit,
which those, who labor under that Distemper so much complain of . . . Tho I was sorry
to find myself engag’d with so tedious a Distemper yet the Knowledge of it, set me very
much at ease, by satisfying me that my former Coldness, proceeded not from any Defect
of Temper or Genius, but from a Disease, to which any one may be subject . . . I have
notic’d in the Writings of the French Mysticks . . . that, when they give a History of the
Situation of their Souls, they mention a Coldness & Desertion of the Spirit, which
frequently returns . . . . I have often thought that their Case & mine were pretty
parralel, & that their rapturous Admirations might discompose the Fabric of the
Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Reflection, & that warmth or Enthusiasm which
is inseperable from them.24
More explicitly than in the Treatise, intense philosophical thought is here depicted
as a form of illness, the ‘Disease of the Learned’. Hume writes to Arbuthnot as a
patient seeking medical advice, one who assumes that, since the condition of the
mind and that of the body have ‘a very near Connexion together’, philosophical
and physical pathologies are closely related.25 However, one peculiar characteristic
of Hume’s distemper is its reflexivity, whereby the very act of reflecting upon his
condition prolongs and exacerbates it. On one level, the letter recognizes this,
acknowledging that reflective thought will always be a form of cognitive hypochon-
dria, compulsively registering the symptoms of a disease of which it is itself the
cause. On another level, however, this very realization itself perpetuates Hume’s
malady by extending the pathology of reflection. For Hume, the act of understanding
his own distemper wounds where it heals, leaving him in a predicament parallel to
that of the ‘French Mysticks’, whose ‘rapturous Admirations might discompose the
Fabric of the Nerves & Brain, as much as profound Reflection’. Admitting that both
philosophy and mysticism are prone to the effects of excessive ‘Enthusiasm’, Hume
attempts to outmanoeuvre reflection with a gesture that he would deploy repeatedly
throughout his career. With an insouciant wave of the hand, he changes the sub-
ject, deploying caesura as a remedy for reflection. Apologizing for his prolixity, he
21 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 13. Kemp Smith interprets this as a declaration of independence from
Locke and Berkeley. He also sees it as indicating that the ‘new Scene of Thought’ Hume had uncovered
by extending Frances Hutcheson’s affective theories of moral judgement ‘to our beliefs regarding matters
of fact and existence’ marks a ‘crisis’ in his thought (David Hume, p. 20).
22 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 13. 23 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 17.
24 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 14–17. 25 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 16.
adds that ‘’tis a Symptom of this Distemper to delight in complaining & talking
of itself.’26 As Jerome Christensen observes, this rhetorical technique fits with
Hume’s general habit of exploiting epistemological paradox ‘as just another articu-
lation, a productive inconsistency’ to be mastered through exercising style as a form
of social activity.27
Viewed this way, the importance of the letter emerges in a different light. Its
fundamental significance is not, as Kemp Smith claims, that it marks the point
at which Hume stumbles upon a new, Hutchesonian solution to a philosophical
problem, or even, as M.A. Stewart suggests, that it commemorates a ‘religious crisis’,
an attempt ‘to place his early self-appraisal and philosophical reflection within a
conventional theistic framework which it cost [Hume] some pains to abandon.’28
Hume’s letter indicates his dissatisfaction not so much with a certain philosophical
method as with philosophy itself : its narrative is one of how a young thinker arrives
at a way of deflating philosophical reflection altogether. In this context, Hume’s
philosophical shrug is highly significant. Both the conversion to the ‘new Scene of
Thought’ and the illness that follow it are functioning parts of a narrative constructed
not to relate Hume’s discovery of a new system of philosophy (whether ‘sentimen-
tal’, ‘naturalistic’, or otherwise), but to demonstrate, through a performance of
Enlightened indifference, the limitations of the philosophical attitude itself. In this
respect, the letter to Arbuthnot shares with Hume’s later work a tendency to engage
rhetorically with problems that, though initially presented as philosophical, ultim-
ately give way to questions of living. This is nowhere more evident than in the
concluding section of Book I of the Treatise, which, as John Sitter notes, re-enacts
many of the ‘dilemmas and solutions’ of the letter to Arbuthnot.29 More specifically,
as Donald Siebert argues, the Arbuthnot letter and the Treatise enact a ‘movement
from ecstatic discovery to bewilderment and anxiety, and then to salvation through
common life.’30 In both pieces of writing, Hume’s disorienting drama of changing
moods confounds philosophical analysis and highlights his emerging reliance upon
narrative, biographical, and performative means of providing his reader with philo-
sophical reassurance in the face of scepticism.
At the heart of this strategy is a picture of the philosopher as a public communi-
cator rather than a private thinker. In a 1944 article, Ernest Mossner registers,
without further comment, the Arbuthnot letter’s ‘Humian reserve’ and lack of
‘Rousseauistic exhibitionism.’31 And yet, this very circumspection is bound up with
26 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 18.

27 Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career
(1987), p. 14.
28 M.A. Stewart, ‘Hume’s Intellectual Development, 1711–1752’, Impressions of Hume, eds.
Marina Frasca-Spada and Peter J.E. Kail (2005), pp. 30–1.
29 Sitter, Loneliness, pp. 32.
30 Donald T. Siebert, ‘ “Ardor of Youth”: The Manner of Hume’s Treatise’, The Philosopher as Writer:
The Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Ginsberg (1987), p. 181. Siebert elaborates on Hume’s need in the
Treatise to have a happy ending based on naturalism: ‘Windows must be flung open, light and air must
be let in to drive away the fumes of philosophical enthusiasm’ (p. 183).
31 Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734: The Biographical
Significance’, Huntington Library Quarterly 7 (1944), p. 135.
Hume’s prioritization of the public over the private offices of intellect. In contrast
to Rousseau, Hume considers individual transparency and sincerity to be themselves
dependent upon social conventions. Since thought is rooted in communication, the
mind must negotiate the pragmatics and courtesies of social intercourse if it is to
engage in meaningful conversation. Egotism and emotional exhibitionism disrupt
this fragile intellectual economy by undermining the tacit agreements that make
conversation possible. In this respect, the fact that Hume is set ‘very much at ease’
by the news that his illness makes him a ‘Brother’ of the physician is particularly
revealing, in that it demonstrates how important it is to the young, solipsistic Hume
that his malady confers membership of a community—in this case, a community
of intellectuals. In future, Hume would set his own readers at ease by using the
conversational and familiar form of the essay to cultivate mutuality. Here, the
dialogical, collaborative, extra-disciplinary framework of the letter facilitates the act
of thinking ‘aloud’ as intersubjective performance, halting Hume’s slide into the
paradoxes of reflection. It is hardly surprising, then, that the letter to Arbuthnot
appears never to have been sent. By the end, Hume’s act of writing has transformed
itself from being the symptom of a disease into its own remedy:
Being sensible that all my Philosophy wou’d never make me contented in my present
Situation, I began to rouze up myself . . . . I found, that as there are two things very bad
for this Distemper, Study & Idleness, so there are two things very good, Business &
Diversion . . . . For this reason I resolved to seek out a more active Life, & tho’ I cou’d
not quit my Pretensions in Learning, but with my last Breath, to lay them aside for
some time, in order the more effectually to resume them.32
By ‘rouzing himself up’, Hume exchanges a philosophical paradigm of reflection
and contemplation for one of ‘Business and Diversion’, a resolution echoed in the
determination expressed by the author of the Treatise ‘never more to renounce the
pleasures of life for the sake of reasoning and philosophy.’33 Though in both
instances this determination turns out to be short-lived, Hume’s proto-pragmatic
turn towards essay writing, history, and the ‘easy’ or ‘active’ philosophy, eschews
certainty in order to cultivate intersubjective consensus through the rhetorical
power of a polite, sociable, and accomplished style.
EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT
This conversion to an empiricism of ‘ease’ was for a long time concealed by Hume’s
reputation as a sceptic, which made it difficult to assess his influence and legacy.
And yet, Hume’s influence upon late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
thought appears obscure only from the perspective of a kind of philosophical posi-
tivism for which scepticism signals the negation of cognition, rather than a method
for rethinking basic paradigms. Leslie Stephen’s failure to detect Hume’s influence
on late eighteenth-century British thinkers, for instance, indicates not that the
32 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 17. 33 Hume, Treatise, p. 269.

intellectual culture of this period had resigned itself to a Hobson’s choice between
common sense and ‘languid scepticism’, but rather that the terms of Stephen’s
own inquiry were unable to register the nature of Hume’s legacy as anything other
than an absence.34 In reality, Hume’s move towards an ‘easy’ philosophy signals a new
attitude towards reflective thought and a fundamental shift away from traditional
epistemology, involving a corresponding change in vocabulary.
This change was assisted in part by an ambiguity within the eighteenth-century
understanding of ‘experience’. The challenge of Hume’s scepticism lies in the way
in which it presses representationalism, and with it the ‘correspondence’ model of
truth and meaning, to its limit. One of the main reasons why his unravelling of
corpuscularian empiricism did not simply produce a ‘languid’ scepticism is that the
contemporary idea of ‘experience’ remained broad enough to accommodate notions
of activity as well as receptivity. Indeed, until the eighteenth century, the words
‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ are so closely related that they could be used synonym-
ously to mean the act of practical, tentative trial. John Bender notes that, while the
English term ‘experience’ and the French ‘expérience’ are distinct (in that only the
latter is fully synonymous with ‘experiment’), experience and experiment ‘intertwine
so richly, as in Hume’s discussions of judgement and probability in his Treatise of
Human Nature, that they become elements in one conceptual domain.’35 Johnson’s
Dictionary testifies to this continued intimacy, defining the noun ‘experience’ as
‘1. Practice; frequent trial’ and ‘2. Knowledge gained by trial and practice.’36 The
philosophy of ideas, however—and especially the widespread influence of associ
ationist and other forms of psychological language—was busily reordering experience
along more phenomenalistic lines of conceptualization. As Bender argues, this
development was simply an extension of one branch of the Baconian model of
knowledge, according to which knowledge occurs ‘when general principles were
determined through controlled analysis of particulars as they emerged from the
planned and specialised form of experience called the experiment.’37 As the ‘experi-
mental’ senses of experience recede during the eighteenth century, they are replaced
by a set of connotations clustered around a Lockean, psychologized rendering of
Bacon’s epistemology. What emerges from this is the idea of a predominantly
receptive subject whose ‘experience’ is a form of knowledge based in observation—
that is, in the words of the OED, the state of ‘being consciously affected by an event’.
Seen from this perspective, Hume’s intervention is pivotal, since his sceptical
critique of reason and receptivity as the basis of a unified and coherent subject
arrives precisely at the point where phenomenalism is beginning to reshape everyday
conceptions of what ‘experience’ is. The Treatise not only questions any epistemol-
ogy conceived as a Cartesian ‘First Philosophy’, it also challenges its reader to think
of experience as foundationless: as Hume puts it, ‘[a]fter the most accurate and exact
of my reasonings, I can give no reason why I shou’d assent to it; and feel nothing
34 Stephen, History, vol. 1, p. 2.

35 John Bender, ‘Novel Knowledge: Judgement, Experience, Experiment’, Fictions of Knowledge:
Fact, Evidence, Doubt, eds. Yota Batsaki, et al. (2012), p. 135.
36 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., vol. 1 (1777).
37 Bender, ‘Novel Knowledge’, p. 136.
but a strong propensity to consider objects strongly in that view, under which they
appear to me.’38 Rather than searching for new foundations, Hume and his ‘essay-
istic’ successors reach for an alternative vocabulary in which the object/subject dyad
is replaced by the language of intersubjectivity. This approach construes knowledge
and subjectivity as relational rather than punctual, held together by trust between
persons rather than tethered to metaphysical grounds. As Sitter argues, ‘as he gravi-
tates towards the ideal of a more sociable prose, Hume moves as well toward a less
passive and solitary description of mind.’39 By supplanting private and psychological
data with public and communicative action as the basis of ‘experience’, Hume’s
naturalized, social epistemology signals a pragmatic turn in eighteenth-century
empiricism, what Nicholas Capaldi refers to as anglophone philosophy’s own
‘Copernican revolution’. Consequently, rather than centring his analysis in the
perspective of a punctual subjectivity, Hume treats persons ‘fundamentally as
agents, as doers, immersed in both a physical world and a social world along with
other agents.’40
THE SOCIAL A PRIORI
An alternative way of phrasing this claim is to state that ‘human life’ considered ‘in
the common course of the world’ becomes for Hume the social a priori of thought,
since without it, knowledge and subjectivity would be impossible. As I argue in
Chapter 1, Hume’s conversion from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ empiricism is the product
of a general tension within Enlightenment thought between the competing value
systems associated respectively with modern Newtonian science and classical ideas
of virtue and eudaimonia. J.G.A. Pocock has demonstrated how this conflict had its
roots in two competing discourses in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-
century British thought: on one hand, a jurisprudential, ‘rights’-based language,
driven by a growing commercial culture, which defined the individual in relation to
his relationship to things, and, on the other, an ancient, civic conception of the citizen
that defined him according to his virtues and actions.41 Hume’s work reflects this
contradiction in Enlightenment thought in a number of ways, but of particular
interest here is his adoption of ancient ethical models of virtue in order to counteract
the alienating effects (abstraction, individuation, specialization) of an increasingly
reified philosophical culture. Cicero’s works are critical in this regard, for while
they originally contributed to Hume’s adolescent ‘distemper’, they effectively heal
the very wound they inflict by providing the philosopher with a route away from
38 Hume, Treatise, p. 265. 39 Sitter, Loneliness, p. 45.

40 Nicholas Capaldi, Hume’s Place in Moral Philosophy (1989), pp. 22–3.
41 See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly
in the Eighteenth Century (1985), p. 48: as Pocock observes, this conflict was triggered in large part by
the advent of public debt and the commercialization of government and military agencies, leading to
fears of increased corruption, which ‘was a problem in virtue, not in right, which could never be solved
by asserting a right of resistance’. Consequently, political thought ‘moves decisively, though never
irrevocably, out of the law-centered paradigm and into the paradigm of virtue and corruption’.
the dangerously self-absorbed vita contemplativa and towards the vita activa.
Ciceronian, ‘Academic’ scepticism establishes a template for the way in which
Hume’s promotion of epoché, or suspension of belief, attempts to harmonize the
apparently conflicting desiderata of rationality on one hand and utility and senti-
ment on the other.
At the same time, the cultivation of manners in Hume’s work forms a bridge
between literary works as consumable things and as enactments of virtue. In this
way, the author’s performance attempts to overcome the contradiction between
commercialization and virtue through a form of what Pocock calls ‘commercial
humanism’, according to which ‘a right to things became a way to the practice of
virtue, so long as virtue could be defined as the practice and refinement of
manners.’42 Adam Smith’s work takes this thought further. In the figure of the
‘impartial spectator’, Smith extends Hume’s socialized intellect by basing agency
upon a thoroughly social and dialogical concept of the moral imagination—one
whose normative basis approximates the aesthetic standards outlined in Hume’s essay
‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Smith’s socially civil and multi-layered conception of virtue
predicates intersubjective norms upon an unintended and spontaneous natural order.
Thus, Smith foregrounds the importance of subjectivity as performance, an idea
that his Theory of Moral Sentiments enacts through its own rhetorical manoeuvres.
Viewed this way, the work of Hume and Smith inhabits the same broad current
as that of common-sense thinkers such as Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. Indeed,
the philosophical differences between Hume and Reid can ultimately be reduced
to a disagreement between naturalists over how to understand the relationship
between knowledge and virtue, or between the pursuit of philosophical certainty
and the continuance of the groundless everyday beliefs necessary for leading an
intelligent life. Cutting across this disagreement is a shared belief that society
underpins rationality, which in turn enables Hume, Smith, Reid, and Stewart to be
receptive to the idea that what Habermas calls the ‘lifeworld’ discourse of the public
sphere has a constitutive role to play in establishing and maintaining rational norms.
Within this lifeworld, the philosophical language of Locke is translated into the
thick vocabulary of social norms and values, whereby the political metaphors of
psychological ‘correspondence’ and ‘association’ are rendered as forms of social
activity. It is the abandonment of this sphere by systems of instrumental rationality
and specialized scientific endeavour that many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers
attempt to halt or even reverse.43
Accordingly, Hume’s intercourse of ‘sentiments’, Reid’s ‘prescience’, and Stewart’s
‘stamina’ of intellect mark the end of an epistemological paradigm constructed around
punctual subjectivity, and the emergence of a form of natural transcendentalism
according to which social conversation, association, and correspondence become the
natural preconditions of meaningful thought. In this respect, as Manfred Kuehn
42 Pocock, Virtue, p. 50.

43 See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, vol. 1
(1984), p. xlii: It is partly because of this divided legacy in Enlightenment thought, Habermas maintains,
that any theory of rationality must incorporate a ‘concept of society that connects the “lifeworld” and
“system” paradigms in more than a rhetorical fashion’.
has argued, Scottish naturalism offers a prototype for Kant’s ‘critique of all preceding
philosophy’ by providing an a priori basis for the foundations of knowledge in
experience.44 However, as Kant recognized, by positing principles of experience that
were themselves beyond justification, it also threatened to undermine philosophy
itself. Underlying Kant’s disdainful image in the Prolegomena of common-sense
philosophy’s vulgar appeal to the ‘multitude’ is his concern that Scottish naturalism
threatens to de-reify and socialize epistemic norms by locating the transcendental, a
priori conditions of coherent experience in communities rather than in psychological
faculties. In this way, socialized empiricism brings to an end an idea of knowledge
(and epistemology) as centred in individual consciousness. The ‘naturalist of pure
reason’ returns reason to earth by clipping the wings of philosophy itself.45
T RU S T A N D T E S T I M O N Y
As Hume comes to realize, the relations of mutuality presupposed by intersubject-

ive knowledge themselves depend, above all, upon networks of trust. Despite his
sceptical treatment of testimony in the Treatise and (more controversially) in the essay
‘Of Miracles’ in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume increasingly
views both testimony and trust as essential to the fabric of social virtues and habits
necessary for the cultivation of reason. In doing so, he places increasing epistemo-
logical weight upon presupposed (and therefore invisible) relationships of truthfulness
between certain individuals who could be identified by the disinterestedness and
moderation of their verbal performances. These qualities constituted what Steven
Shapin terms the ‘epistemological decorum’ of a mitigated scepticism that distinguished
the independent gentleman as a reliable truth-teller, i.e. a testifier free from necessity
and constraint.46 In this way, Hume’s Academic scepticism presents the metaphysical
foundations of ‘experimental’ philosophy as themselves dependent upon intersub-
jective relationships in which, in Shapin’s words, ‘[m]anners, mores, and mundane
ontology were implicated together in a moral economy of truth.’47
In Chapter 2, I argue that trust and testimony acquire a significance in the work
of Hume and his contemporaries that belies the relatively scant (and in Hume’s
case, wary) attention they pay to the subject. As Annette Baier, Martin Hollis,
Guido Möllering, and John Hardwig have maintained, philosophy’s suspicion of
trust is rooted in the fact that, since the latter is fundamentally non-rational and
social, it is antithetical to the Cartesian picture of a lucid, private rationality.
In Möllering’s words, one of the defining aspects of trust is that it ‘rests on the fiction
of a reality in which social uncertainty and vulnerability are unproblematic’ that is
44 Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History
of Critical Philosophy (1987), p. 34.
45 Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, eds. Henry Allison and Peter Heath (2002),
p. 107.
46 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
(1996), p. xxix.
47 Shapin, Social History, p. xxx.
itself ‘produced intersubjectively through interaction with others and through

institutionalized practices.’48 These fictions become for Hume the social presup-
positions of knowledge, since, in Möllering’s words, ‘a fiction of reality tends to be
maintained and may even become “real” in the sense of a social fact.’49 Having
unsettled the empirical foundations of impressions and ideas, Hume proceeds to
replace an ideal and dyadic correspondence between mind and world with a social
and triangular correspondence between two or more individuals and the world.
This in turn highlights the importance of virtue and character. Truth itself, Hume
realizes, depends upon social norms, and thus upon morality: if, as Annette Baier
maintains, the narrative of the Treatise is that of the triumph of sentiment over
reason, then trust is for Hume the social sentiment sine qua non.50
By enshrining trust as epistemologically basic, the Humean picture of commu-
nicative intelligence emerges as the antitype of the Rousseauian model, which
attempts to ground trust upon transparency, perfect sympathy, and reason. Indeed,
the conflict between instrumental reason and trust that continues to exercise philo-
sophers and economists today has its roots in the work of Hume, Rousseau, and
other thinkers from this period. As Martin Hollis observes, the problems with
Rousseau’s conception of social reason would be exposed by the ways in which Jacobin
demands for truthfulness, candour, and transparency undermined the very condi-
tions of trust upon which, as Hume perceived, the performance of reason depends.
This paradox in turn highlights the fact that ‘the progress of reason destroys ties which
free people need’, which, for Hollis, demonstrates the need for a non-instrumental
conception of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good—
in other words, a conception of trust within reason.51 It is this notion, I argue, that
Hume, Reid, and Stewart pioneer.
C O M M U N I C AT I O N
The rhetoric of intersubjectivity in Hume and Smith underscores the ways in

which the proto-pragmatic turn in empiricism is also, in a broad sense, a linguistic
turn. Shapin has demonstrated how, for much of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, the social intellect was the communicative intellect: truth in
scientific and philosophical discourse ‘flowed along the same personal channels as
civil conversation.’52 In Chapter 3, I explore the impact that the drawing together
of empirical knowledge and communication has upon theories of language in the
later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I argue that Hume’s Academic
scepticism regarding ‘correspondence’ in both knowledge and reference spurs a
reappraisal of the relationship between language, thought, and reality. In turn, this
48 Guido Möllering, Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (2006), p. 112.

49 Möllering, Trust, p. 114.
50 See Annette C. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (1991), p. 20: according
to Baier, Hume offers ‘natural sentiment not as a mere distraction but as the replacer of reason. Reason
must be worked through, taken to the end of its tether, before sentiment can take over the guiding role.’
51 Martin Hollis, Trust within Reason (1998), p. 14. 52 Shapin, Social History, p. 410.
reconsideration leads to a pragmatic deconstruction of the thought/thing and idea/

word dyads and, as Brigitte Nerlich and David Clarke observe, a heightened interest
in pragmatics, culminating in the speech-act theories of Reid and Bentham.53
Indeed, running throughout the work of Hume, Reid, and Bentham is the idea
that the problems that had beset empiricism since Locke regarding the arbitrary
and metaphorical nature of language might be obviated by replacing a private, rep-
resentational model of knowledge and language with one based on intersubjective
norms whose validity rests upon their performance within a speech community.
The question that divides these thinkers, however, is that of whether such norms
can be fixed and articulated through a system of philosophical principles. ‘Serious’-
minded thinkers such as Reid and Stewart answer this question in the affirmative,
claiming that the communicative act is incorporated into thought itself. By denying
the proposition, however, ‘rhetorical’ thinkers such as Hume, Tooke, and Bentham
ultimately disperse philosophical thought into its various communicative acts, into
the rhetoric of philosophy.
Consequently, unlike Reid, who does not permit his own theory of performed
speech acts to alter his view of the philosopher as scientist, Hume cultivates a style
that presupposes that philosophy is limited in its ability to represent the true and the
good. This in turn suggests that any assessment of Hume’s arguments relating to
the roles played by trust, sentiment, and virtue in human life should be sensitive
to the ways in which these notions inhabit Hume’s own practice of writing as a
kind of performance. In accentuating this dimension of Hume’s work, I follow in
the footsteps of a number of critics who have argued, in Alexander Dick’s words,
that ‘the rhetorical performance of empiricism is part of the condition described.’54
While this mode of writing, as Angela Esterhammer demonstrates, reaches its zen-
ith in the ironies and sublimities of Romanticism (including the familiar prose of
Lamb and Hazlitt), its conditions of possibility lie in Hume’s original dismantling
of representationalism, which intensifies doubts regarding the capacity of language
to represent the world.55
E S S AY S A N D E S S AY I N G
In this book’s final two chapters, I argue that mid- and late eighteenth-century
‘conversational’ philosophy models itself on the familiar essay. In Chapter 4, my claim
is that understanding the ways in which the essay comes to embody Hume’s ‘easy’
philosophy involves appreciating how the genre’s experimental and improvisational
manner evolved in line with a conception of experience as experiment. As the Oxford
53 See Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke, Language, Action, and Context: The Early History of
Pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780–1930 (1996).
54 Alexander Dick, introduction, Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between
Philosophy and Literature, eds. Alexander Dick and Christina Lupton (2008), p. 3. See also: Fred
Parker, Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (2003); John J. Richetti,
Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (1983); M.A. Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume (1991).
55 See Angela Esterhammer, The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German
Romanticism (2000).
English Dictionary records, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ share a
common origin in the words meaning ‘to try, put to the test.’56 With its groping
attempts to establish commonalities through the performance of character and
dialogue, the essay becomes a metaphor for the kind of experience wherein, in the
absence of certainty, the activity of conversation establishes the virtues necessary
for establishing moral and epistemological norms. It is in the exploitation of the
permeable borders between ‘experience’ as knowledge and ‘experience’ as experiment
that the familiar essayist aspires to Max Bense’s image (cited approvingly by Adorno)
of the methodically unmethodical writer who ‘writes while experimenting.’57
Nonetheless, the essay as Hume and Johnson inherit it is an epistemologically
ambivalent genre, rooted in both the rhetorical playfulness of Michel de Montaigne
and the aphoristic, practical empiricism of Francis Bacon. From these very different
sources, the essay emerges in this period as a complex literary form whose affiliations
with commonplace books, reading manuals, and epistolary writing enable it to range
freely across disciplinary boundaries. By rethinking experience as social experiment,
Hume ensures that the familiar essay assumes a function that mediates between the
propagation of scientific knowledge and the emulation of the fragmentary, impro-
visatory progress of the human intellect. At the same time, the essay genre remains
a symptom of the very wound it tries to heal. Indeed, like ‘trust’, ‘experience’, and
‘literature’, the origins of the ‘essay’ lie in a process of disassociation whereby the
products of collective endeavour (‘truth’, ‘perception’, ‘writing’, the ‘work’ of an
author) are increasingly abstracted from human activity.
In this sense, the modern essay is the product of the very forces against which its
embodiment of a decentred intersubjectivity protests; it is caught in the reflex of an
increasingly abstract and essentialized subjectivity. Consequently, the genre remains
suspended between two postures: in its Montaignean, familiar mood, it tends to be
nostalgic and sentimental, attempting to roll back adult certainties to regain a
sense of possibility through playful trial; in its more Baconian, systematic mood, it
becomes a vehicle for increasingly abstract forms of rationality conducted through
rigorously theorized experimental procedures. In the first, the essay offers experiment/
experience as a tentative test that engages the trust of the reader as a means of consoli-
dating consensus; in the second, it presents experiment/experience as scientific
method for arriving at truth.
C O N S O L I D AT I O N A N D P RO D U C T I O N
Following the upheavals of the 1790s, perceptions of what might be at stake in the
literary performance of the familiar essay shift markedly. For both Hume and
Johnson, the fictions of social cohesion (the forerunners of Burke’s ‘second nature’)
form the preconditions for rational discourse; consequently, the social intellect is
policed in the court of custom, habit, and character. The empirical performative
56 According to the OED, both noun and verb forms of ‘essay’ have roots in the Old French ‘essai ’,
while ‘experience’ stems from the Latin ‘experiri ’.
57 Adorno, ‘Essay’, p. 164.
promises no transcendental compensations: instead of symbolizing a lost wholeness,

it gestures towards the social virtues, and above all trust, as the ultimate guarantors
of meaning. However, the Revolutionary debates of the final decade of the century
made the consolidation of imagined solidarity appear evermore precarious. At the
same time, reading audiences were becoming larger, more diverse, and less ‘familiar’.
As essayists sought firmer grounds for literary ‘truth’, the experimental maintenance
and consolidation of intersubjective consensus was replaced by the experimental
production of new intellectual territory. Once social harmonies were exchanged for
transcendental sublimities, Hume’s idea of literature as the domain of polite letters,
courtly virtues, and easy philosophizing was overtaken by the Romantic notion of
literature as, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge’.
The subject invoked by the Romantic familiar essay is one who searches, however
unsuccessfully and ironically, for transcendental authentication. Accordingly, the
persona of Hazlitt’s essay is that of a powerful ego striving to establish unity amidst
bewildering contingency, while Lamb’s style, particularly in the ‘Elia’ essays, errs
towards the ironic and partial recuperation of a lost wholeness. This stands in
marked contrast to the literary manner of Hume and Johnson, which presupposes
an intersubjective conception of identity—one determined by pragmatic, rather
than by metaphysical, principles.
As I argue in Chapter 5, however, we should resist the conclusion that this shift
represents the eclipse of social empiricism by idealism. Indeed, one reason why
descriptors such as ‘empiricism’ and ‘idealism’ feel clumsy when applied to describing
the differences between Neoclassical and Romantic familiar essayists is that all of these
writers exhibit, in different ways, a profound ambivalence towards philosophy itself.
It is this ambivalence that lends the familiar essay its shape, and, in many respects,
its fundamental purpose, defining a space in which formal understanding, aesthetic
appreciation, and social communication overlap. Seen from this perspective, the
conversational, ironic, and philosophy-deflating Hume (for example) and the con-
versational, ironic, and philosophy-ridiculing Lamb have a surprising amount in
common, not least in that both defy contemporary philosophical taxonomies.
Moreover, and on a more general level, the disciplinary boundaries between ‘phil-
osophy’ and ‘literature’ in the late eighteenth century remained inchoate at best, and
they would only fully emerge once the implications of German idealist aesthetics
had finally seeped through into nineteenth-century British intellectual culture.
In theoretical terms, the idea that literature qua ‘Literature’ might, as pure ‘generativ-
ity’, compensate for, or even redeem philosophy’s failure to complete itself by figuring
the absolute productively (as what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
describe as the ‘literary absolute’), entailed setting out from a fundamentally Kantian
settlement between the self, experience, and the world.58
In Lamb and Hazlitt, however, this picture is more complicated. Ideas of vision-
ary imagination and poetic truth are invoked in the absence of transcendental
58 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard
and Cheryl Lester (1988), p. 12: ‘[R]omantic thought involves not only the absolute of literature, but
literature as the absolute. Romanticism is the inauguration of the literary absolute.’
foundations and (by extension) any clear sense of the work of art as autotelic.
Consequently, their essays exhibit a form of expressive liminality: not only do they
occupy an indeterminate status between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, they also offer
an image of the self that attempts to blend an inherited discourse of sociability and
pragmatic intersubjectivity with aspects of an emerging, albeit untheorized tran-
scendental idealism. Thus, while for Hume and Johnson the problem of writing
the familiar essay is one of how to ground authority and consolidate knowledge in
the discursive space of the public sphere and the ‘conversable’ world, the challenge
facing Lamb and Hazlitt is one of how to reconfigure this space as ideal and pro-
ductive, without divorcing the genre from the very conditions of sociability and
intersubjectivity upon which it depends.
AN UNMETHODICAL METHOD
Finally, a brief word about method, which is a topic one can ill afford to neglect in
studying a genre whose distinguishing feature, as Adorno indicates, is that it proceeds
‘methodically unmethodically.’59 Adorno argues that the essay’s aesthetic autonomy
lies in its resistance to the Enlightenment’s false binary of ‘[t]echnician or dreamer’,
methodical scientist, or unmethodical artist. The essayist rejects this Hobson’s
choice by being ambiguously intuitive and conceptual at once. To this extent, the
essay as form critiques what Adorno and Horkheimer term the ‘triumphant calamity’
of Enlightenment, through which a program of ‘disenchantment’ inaugurates a form
of systematic rationality whose commitment to knowledge as domination comes
at the price of alienation.60 Similarly, some of the key claims of this book regarding
the preoccupation of Enlightenment and Romantic writers with certain concepts—
particularly ‘trust’, ‘manners’, ‘sociability’, ‘experience’, and ‘essaying’ itself—share
Adorno and Horkheimer’s concern with how the emergence of such ideas betrays
(and, indeed, creates) an absence, a loss of immediacy and connection. As Eagleton
argues, this development is bound up more broadly with the ‘growing aestheticization
of social life’ in the eighteenth century.61 Thus, through the inculcation of ‘habits,
pieties, sentiments and affections’, a new bourgeois social order signalled its rejec-
tion of absolutism while trying to respond to the problem of how society might
be regulated once ancient feudal structures had been dismantled.62 Adorno and
Horkheimer make a similar point when they describe the ways in which the trad-
itional and material social bonds that unite societies are abstracted into discourses
of calculation and instrumentality:
Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the
dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship
of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of
59 Adorno, ‘Essay’, p. 161.

60 See Adorno, ‘Essay’, p. 166: ‘The essay remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence;
specifically, it constructs the immanent criticism of cultural artefacts . . . it is the critique of ideology.’
61 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), p. 44. 62 Eagleton, Ideology, p. 20.

mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes
of operation objectively expected of them.63
This point regarding the aestheticization of power, through which, in Eagleton’s
words, ‘[c]ustom, piety, intuition and opinion must now cohere an otherwise
abstract, atomised social order’, applies particularly to the familiar essay, which
attempts to overcome such contradictions both formally (‘methodically unmeth-
odically’) and in its typical choice of subject matter (current opinions, manners,
fashions, sentiments). In this respect, ‘social’ empiricism and the familiar essay are
simultaneously symptoms of and responses to the malady of Enlightenment
rationalism diagnosed by Hume in his letter to Arbuthnot. As Adorno points out,
Romanticism does not remove this contradiction, since the fundamental ‘untruth’
at stake in the Enlightenment is not analysis, reflection, or abstraction per se, but
the presupposed presence of absolute knowledge itself, the ‘assumption that the
trial is prejudged.’64 Both moments in this dialectic are vital: the Romantic essay is
a product of the Enlightenment and also a critique of it, an ‘anti-idealist motive
even in the midst of idealism.’65 Similarly, a truly dialectical method for under-
standing the aesthetic ideology of mercantile interests in the long eighteenth cen-
tury must register the extent to which the transfer of power from an absolute ruling
bloc to a general culture of politeness and civility constitutes a progressive gain. As
Eagleton observes, ‘[i]f we can and must be severe critics of Enlightenment, it is
Enlightenment which has empowered us to be so.’66
However, while this study recognizes the contradictions at work within many of
the concepts under discussion, it eschews the metatheory of negative dialectics.
As Habermas argues, Adorno and Horkheimer oversimplify the landscape of
Enlightenment rationality by focusing exclusively upon the objectification of nature
and the instrumentalisation of rationality, thereby neglecting conceptions of
knowledge and experience that were not geared toward the production of technical
improvement. By extending their suspicion of Enlightenment reason to reason
itself, they install a totalized ‘other’ of reason—one that is, in its turn, inherently
undialectical. The result of this is that critique is divorced from its own founda-
tions, fostering, in Habermas’s words, both ‘totalization and independence of
critique.’67 Moreover, what is lost in this analysis is the ‘explosive power of basic
aesthetic experiences that a subjectivity liberated from the imperatives of purposive
activity . . . gains from its own decentering.’68 In contrast, the present study endeav-
ours as much as possible to avoid reinscribing hypostatizations, both positive and
63 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,

ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (2002), p. 21.
64 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, p. 18. 65 Adorno, ‘Essay’, p. 164.
66 Eagleton, Ideology, p. 8.
67 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
Lawrence (1987), p. 119. As Habermas notes, Adorno, like Nietzsche before him, was conscious of
the performative contradiction involved in deploying the very methods he rejects in Enlightenment
totalitarianism in order to overcome it. Negative Dialectics (1966) was an attempt to explain the neces-
sity of this contradiction.
68 Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 113.
negative. In the tradition of the familiar essayist, it does so by acknowledging the

need for the intersubjectively presupposed grounds that allow any conversation to
begin.69 This is doubly vital in the context of the subject matter of this book, since
it is the existence and nature of such pragmatic grounds of communication that are
found to be at stake in both the ‘aestheticisation’ of empiricism and the flourishing
of the familiar essay in the period between Hume and Hazlitt.
69 See Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 130: ‘In argumentation, critique is constantly entwined
with theory, enlightenment with grounding, even though discourse participants always have to suppose
that only the unforced force of the better argument comes into play under the unavoidable communica-
tion presuppositions of argumentative discourse.’
1
Self and Intersubjectivity
I N T RO D U C T I O N
One of the central contentions of this book is that the language of intersubjectivity
that emerges in the eighteenth century is not, strictly speaking, ‘epistemological’,
(at least, not in the Cartesian or Lockean sense of being centred in an essential
selfhood); rather, it is social and rhetorical. Hume’s radical innovation is to usher
this language into the precincts of philosophy itself. Having searched fruitlessly
for certainty in the grounds of consciousness in Book 1 of the Treatise, Hume
takes the radical step of remodelling ‘experience’ entirely. In doing so, he reorients
Enlightenment thought away from the discourse of faculty psychology and towards
that of intersubjectivity and emotion, taking in conversation, sociability, and
sentiment. This shift away from psychology and the idea of the punctual self rever-
berates throughout the work of Hume’s contemporaries, regardless of whether they
accept, reject, or ignore his arguments. Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and, later, Dugald
Stewart build upon Hume’s socialized empiricism by rethinking ‘truth’ in terms of
the pragmatic presuppositions that underlie cognitive judgements and ordinary
communication in the course of what Hume sees as the ‘common affairs of life’ and
Reid identifies as the ‘social operations of the human mind.’1
Hume’s own conception of the intersubjective basis of knowledge and morals is
influenced by the active, practical, and socially engaged thinking of Cicero. Through
the pragmatic principle of suspending judgement (epoché ), Cicero provided Hume
with an understanding of how to manage the relationship between knowledge
as episteme or science and as doxa or everyday certainty (and thus between the vita
contemplativa and the vita activa). Consequently, Hume presents his task in the
Enquiries as that of mediating between an anatomical and exact Aristotelian
philosophy and a more painterly and socially engaged form of Ciceronian rhetoric.
This strategy of philosophical diplomacy in turn reflects a broader tension within
eighteenth-century thought in Britain: between the epistemological norms of
Newtonian science on one hand and the practical ethics foregrounded by classical
theories of virtue and eudaemonia on the other. Setting out from Cicero instead of
Newton enables Hume to highlight the performative dimension of subjectivity and
to develop a social model of reason; this model in turn becomes a counterweight
1 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), p. 448. See also Hume, Treatise: ‘Here
then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the
common affairs of life.’ (p. 269).
24 Self and Intersubjectivity
to the notion of a self defined by the possession of a single, unified consciousness.

By taking the ‘easy’, probabilistic, and Ciceronian route through the paradoxes of
belief and scepticism, Hume foregrounds the moral and aesthetic dimensions to
knowledge, thereby raising the epistemological profiles of virtue and taste.
Since Kemp Smith, debates about the roles of sentiment and intersubjectivity in
Hume have been dominated by the question of naturalism, an issue Hume raises in
the Treatise when he argues that in the face of radical scepticism, ‘Nature will always
maintain her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever.’2
‘Naturalism’, however, is an inconveniently broad term and should be deployed
with caution. The Ciceronian perspective upon Hume’s thought is helpful here
because it helps to explain the conditions according to which he was able to combine
elements of scepticism and naturalism; it enables one to appreciate that Hume’s
Academic scepticism is, strictly speaking, neither a metaphysical nor an epistemo-
logical thesis, but a practical philosophy of life. This pragmatic feature of Hume’s
thought informs his alignment of aesthetic, cognitive, and moral judgements.
As Peter Jones argues, while Hume insists that the ultimate standard in any judgement
must be ‘experience and observation’, he relies throughout the Enquiries upon a
notion of qualified but ‘neither infallible nor irreplaceable’ observers as the only
possible standard of objectivity.3 To this extent, Hume bases cognitive norms upon
the very same standards as those that are seen to support aesthetic judgements in
his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. Here, Hume suggests that ‘universal’ norms,
whether epistemic, aesthetic, moral, sentimental, could only ever be intersubjective—
in other words, based on human virtues that are generally agreed to correspond to
‘sound’ states of judgement.4
Hume’s intersubjective ‘standard of taste’ casts important light upon Adam
Smith’s deployment of the impartial spectator in his theory of moral judgement.
Smith’s role in developing Hume’s concept of sympathy has been well documented.
As D.D. Raphael notes, by uncoupling sympathy from considerations of utility
and allowing that ‘sympathy can be a sharing of any feeling’, Smith offers a more
complex picture than Hume of the moral sentiments.5 In the figure of the ‘impartial
spectator’, moreover, Smith further develops the intersubjective norms posited by
Hume in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ by locating them within the conscience of every
individual, thereby resting moral judgement upon a reflective act of imagination
rather than a sentimental reflex. By doing so, Smith bases agency in a thoroughly
social and dialogical concept of moral selfhood. This in turn is linked to a concept of
virtue that is multilayered rather than essentialized, and which predicates intersub-
jective norms upon an unintended, spontaneous social order. Smith’s depiction
of the natural convergence of virtuous behaviour highlights the importance of
2 Hume, Treatise, p. 41.

3 Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (1982), p. 64.
4 See David Hume, ‘On the Standard of Taste’, Essays, pp. 233–4: ‘In each creature, there is a
sound and a defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us the true standard of
taste and sentiment.’
5 D.D. Raphael, introduction, The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, eds. A.L. Macfie
and D.D. Raphael (1976), p. 13.
Self and Intersubjectivity 25
performed behaviours to the moral economy of any society, an idea that is embodied
in The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ enactment of its own central premise regarding
the theatricality of the moral feelings. Indeed, style comes to play a vital role in
Hume and Smith, insofar as it underpins the trusting relationships that sustain
polite conversation and sociability.
While Hume’s self-consciously easy blend of Aristotelianism and Ciceronianism
inaugurates a playful dialogue between philosophical reflection and quotidian
experience, Thomas Reid, by contrast, attempts to unite philosophy and everyday
thought under the umbrella of common sense. By doing this, Reid aims to invest
the social intellect with a philosophical legitimacy that he felt was absent from
Hume’s account of the artificial virtues. Hume had based judgement upon feelings
rooted in custom and habit. In this way, as Baier observes, ‘[r]elations between
thinking persons and relations between thought contents turn out not to be inde-
pendent of each other.’6 However, by locating the truth instinct in a non-rational
predisposition, or ‘a kind of prescience of human actions’ necessary for human
communication and interpretation, Reid grounds knowledge in an intuition that
he treats as philosophically foundational.7 As Heiner Klemme argues, ‘[f ]or Hume,
our flight to common sense is the result of our ignorance about first principles; for
Reid, common sense is nothing other than the domain of the original principles.’8
Another way of putting this is that, while for Hume and Smith the mental is social,
for Reid and Stewart the social is mental.
One surprising result of these developments is that, insofar it rethinks experience as
a practical activity that presupposes a social nexus of customs, habits, and relations,
the pragmatic turn in the empiricism of Hume, Smith, Reid, and Stewart increasingly
takes on the logic of a transcendental argument. Of these thinkers, Stewart is most
alert to the implications of this shift. Although he agrees with Reid that perception
presupposes judgement, Stewart does not believe that this judgement is based in
mere common sense. Instead, he argues that the task of philosophy is to systematize
human understanding at an axiomatic level. With Kant, Stewart maintains that
knowledge is fundamentally based in a (non-empirical) transcendental principle,
which, itself being indemonstrable, should be classed among a special order of truths
that in the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792–1827) he describes
as the ‘Fundamental Laws of Human Belief, or Primary Elements of Human Reason.’9
Nonetheless, Stewart considers these elements to constitute a practical rather than an
ideal a priori footing for human knowledge. When compared to Kant’s transcendental
idealism, Stewart’s system appears as a form of anthropological transcendentalism,
based, like that of his Scottish Enlightenment precursors, upon an account of human
instinct and the entirely natural preconditions for living an intelligent life.
6 Baier, Progress, p. 28.

7 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, 4th ed.
(1785), pp. 427–8.
8 Heiner F. Klemme, ‘Scepticism and Common Sense’, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish
Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (2003), p. 132.
9 Dugald Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. William Hamilton, vol. 2 (1854–60),
p. 44.
In pursuing varying forms of natural or anthropological transcendentalism, the

four thinkers discussed in this chapter respond to the epistemological stalemate of
Hume’s scepticism by exchanging the vocabulary of psychological foundationalism
inherited from Locke for one of natural description. In this respect, they differ
markedly from contemporaries such as David Hartley and Joseph Priestley, who
continue to embrace psychologism despite the withering of any confidence in the
ability of the latter to secure apodictic grounds for scientific knowledge. And yet,
what might appear as a straightforward parting of ways between Scottish natural-
ism and English associationism in the late eighteenth century is complicated by the
fact that naturalism remains divided between, on one hand, a sceptical, rhetorical,
and performative tendency, as represented by Hume and Smith, and, on the other, a
commitment to foundationalism maintained by Reid and Stewart. In this regard, it
is the common-sense school that stands apart in its belief that philosophy still has
important work to do, independently of science, in establishing a secure basis
for knowledge.
Nonetheless, a common thread that runs throughout the Academic scepticism
of Hume, the commonsensism of Reid, and the anthropological transcendentalism
of Stewart is a rolling back of abstract universalism in favour of a kind of pragmatic
holism. As this development gathers strength, the language of pure reason is gradually
replaced by the rhetoric of trust, friendship, and intersubjectivity, implying that at
the private as well as the social level, truth depends upon the truthfulness and the
trustworthiness of others. In place of representationalism and the correspondence
model of knowledge, these thinkers situate ‘truth’ within a socialized epistemology
of life, friendship, and sincerity. Ultimately then, what we witness in the socialized
empiricism of the late eighteenth century is the end of epistemology as the attempt
to secure knowledge through the perceptions of a centred consciousness. Indeed,
as I discuss below, it is possible to read Hume’s separation of theory and practice as
a form of postmodern irony avant la lettre. And yet, despite recent Deleuzian and
Rortian readings of Hume, his own brand of counter-Enlightenment thinking
ultimately has more in common with the theories of communicative rationality
found in the work of philosophers such as Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas,
both of whom have outlined broadly pragmatized, ‘deflated’ conceptions of truth.
Such conceptions, as I argue in the closing sections of this chapter, play crucial roles
in forming the framework for an empirical conception of knowledge predicated
upon communicative activity in the mid- to late eighteenth century.
M A K I N G A V I RT U E O F S C E P T I C I S M
Central to Hume’s socialized empiricism is communication, underlined by his

reflections on the nature of language in the Treatise, which point to the dependency
of human knowledge upon (often unspoken) social arrangements. Although Hume
did not produce a fully developed theory of language (unlike Smith), his interest
in the way that customs shape human nature drew him towards an account of lan-
guage as social and conventional. The groundwork for this conception is laid out in
the Treatise’s nominalistic treatment of abstract ideas. Despite maintaining that ideas
are ultimately derived from impressions, Hume concluded that the underdeter-
mination of our complex and abstract notions by sensory data suggests that such
abstractions are, in effect, nothing more than particular ideas acting as placeholders
for more general ideas. Moreover, these ideas only acquire their general significance
through language. As Hume indicates in the early Treatise section ‘Of Abstract Ideas’,
a ‘word raises up an individual idea, along with a certain custom; and that custom
produces any other individual one, for which we may have occasion.’10 For Hume,
as Claudia Schmidt observes, we not only acquire ‘most of the words that we use to
designate our abstract ideas by learning an existing language’, we also ‘develop many
abstract ideas by learning the general terms of a particular linguistic community.’11
In this way, cognition itself is seen by Hume to depend upon conventions that are
developed within linguistic communities; practical reasoning, as outlined the
Treatise, is underpinned by a presupposition of social solidarity that operates in
ways that are similar to the conventions of linguistic and monetary exchanges. This
supposition is based upon ‘a convention or agreement betwixt us’ that is ‘gradually
establish’d by human conventions without any promise.’12 As Jones and Livingston
argue, the significance of such non-contractual conventions is that the formation
of complex ideas necessary for human interaction depends upon the maintenance
of the trusting relationships that sustain the ‘natural processes whereby social rules
are hammered out unreflectively over time.’13 There are no rational principles to
describe such processes.
Hume’s interest in the ways in which linguistic conventions structure complex
ideas is in line with his subordination of epistemological problems to social and
relational questions. It also signals a shift in thinking about belief, a move away
from a model based upon the correspondence between ideas and the world, and
towards one governed by the correspondence between individuals within a com-
munity. As Jones points out, in his essay on miracles, Hume ‘emphasises that we
have to rely on testimony, that is, reports by others . . . because knowledge is a social
phenomenon and cannot be acquired alone.’ Thus, he ‘holds that there could be
little knowledge without others on whom to rely for testimony about events we
have not experienced ourselves.’14 Consequently, as Hume acknowledges, ‘there is
no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human
life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-
witnesses and spectators.’15 I discuss the particular importance of trust and testi-
mony to Hume in Chapter 2. Here, however, it is sufficient to note that by reflecting
on testimony, Hume connects his empiricism of custom and habit to a more gen-
eral thesis regarding the social character of knowledge.
On these terms, ‘easy’ philosophy appears as a kind of coherentist epistemology
that abandons the foundations of certainty in favour of forging a community of
10 Hume, Treatise, p. 21.

11 Claudia M. Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (2003), p. 417.
12 Hume, Treatise, p. 490. 13 Livingston, Common Life, p. 66.
14 Jones, Hume’s Sentiments, p. 165. 15 Hume, Enquiries, p. 111.
belief. However, for Hume the ramifications of intersubjectivity go further.

As Parker notes, Hume’s manoeuvre ‘describes a kind of paradigm shift, whereby the
intellectual dilemma is not at all addressed in its own terms but is simply abandoned,
displaced by the arrival of a truth of a quite different kind.’16 Hume’s socialized
empiricism uncovers a moral and aesthetic dimension to knowledge, raising in turn
the epistemological profiles of virtue and taste. The first of these elements is reflected
in the stress Hume places on the cultivation of an ‘accomplished’ character in the
Enquiries, one that displays ‘in conversation that discernment and delicacy which
arise from polite letters; and in business, that probity and accuracy which are the
natural result of a just philosophy.’17 Accordingly, the task of philosophy is not
merely to communicate an intellectual position, it is also to promote a certain form of
life, according to which ‘happiness and prosperity of mankind, arising from the social
virtue of benevolence and its subdivisions’ rest upon intersubjective relationships.18
By accentuating the principle that speculative thought should not overshadow
the importance of living a good life, Hume reveals his disenchantment with the
prospect of constructing a science of man solely according to a Newtonian model.
This disillusionment corresponds to his increasing interest in the work of Cicero, a
development which he narrates in the Enquiries as an attempt to moderate between
the anatomical exactness of Aristotelianism and the painterly ease of Ciceronian
rhetoric.19 In his Academica (c.45 bc), Cicero defended the moderate scepticism
of the ‘Academic’ philosophy associated with Carneades of Cyrene, endorsing
Carneades’ claim that ‘there is no presentation of such a sort as to result in percep-
tion, but many that result in a judgement of probability.’20 As Harvey Cormier
observes, ancient scepticism ‘did not claim to provide a pessimistic but still some-
how true picture of humanity’s intellectual relationship to the world. Instead, like
Epicureanism and Stoicism, it offered a way of life that would lead to peace of
mind.’21 Consequently, for Cicero, scepticism results in intellectual paralysis only
where it is not self-applied; being sceptical even about our sceptical doubts leads us
to recognize that there are also degrees of probability that are useful in living a
human life.
Central to this moderate, probabilistic scepticism is the practical principle of
suspending judgement (epoché ). As Cicero declares in De Natura Deorum (c.45 bc),
‘philosophy has its origin and starting-point in ignorance, and . . . the Academic
School were well-advised in “withholding assent” from beliefs that are uncertain:
for what is more unbecoming than ill-considered haste?’22 Here again, Cicero
adopts the Carneadean position that problems of knowledge cannot be considered
in isolation from questions of well-being: even in the absence of certainty, ‘there
16 Parker, Scepticism and Literature, p. 26. 17 Hume, Enquiries, p. 8.

18 Hume, Treatise, p. 305. 19 See Hume, Enquiries, p. 9.
20 Cicero, De Natura Deorum and Academica, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library
(1933), p. 595.
21 Harvey Cormier, The Truth is what Works: William James, Pragmatism, and the Seed of Death
(2001), p. 91.
22 Cicero, De Natura Deorum and Academica, p. 3.
remain presentations of a sort that arouse us to action.’23 By maintaining epoché as

part of living a good life, Academic scepticism provides Hume with a model of scep-
tical empiricism that incorporates at its heart a philosophy of activity and of human
flourishing. Accordingly, in the key fifth section of the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (‘Sceptical Solution of These Doubts’), Hume warns of the dangers
of excessive philosophizing and links overthinking to social alienation and Stoicism,
noting that ‘while we aspire to the magnanimous firmness of the philosophic sage,
and endeavour to confine our pleasures altogether within our own minds, we may, at
last, render our philosophy like that of Epictetus, and other Stoics, only a more
refined system of selfishness, and reason ourselves out of all virtue as well as social
enjoyment.’24 And yet, he notes, there remains
one species of philosophy which seems little liable to this inconvenience . . . and that is
the Academic or Sceptical philosophy. The academics always talk of doubt and suspense
of judgement, of danger in hasty determinations, of confining to very narrow bounds
the enquiries of the understanding, and of renouncing all speculations which lie not
within the limits of common life and practice.25
By transforming scepticism into the wisdom of ‘common life and practice’, Cicero
provides Hume with a route from epistemological paradox to ‘easy’ empiricism.
This conversion from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ empiricism reflects the tension within
Enlightenment thought between the values of Newtonian science and those of
classical virtue. As Peter Fosl has noted, Hume’s own account of mitigated scepticism
‘is in complete agreement with Cicero’s’, a fact that has considerable ramifications
for his thought more generally.26 It is important to note, moreover, that Cicero’s
significance for Hume had as much to do with the way in which the Roman orator
exemplified an attitude (towards philosophy, society, life) as it did with the doctrine
of mitigated or Academic scepticism per se. Nor was Hume unusual in this respect.
During the Enlightenment, as Matthew Fox notes, the reputation of Cicero rested
more ‘on the effectiveness of his discourse, whether in oratory, letters or philosophical
writings . . . for its statesman-like authority; its polite, educated quality; its pedagogic
value; its republicanism’ than on his contribution as a philosopher.27 And yet,
reading Cicero’s philosophy had troubled the young Hume: the ‘Disease of the
Learned’ that had afflicted him as a teenager was exacerbated by reading ‘many
Books of Morality’, including Cicero. It is only later that Hume realizes that,
regardless of orientation, immoderate engagement in philosophical analysis is
counterproductive, and that too much time in the study is philosophically unhealthy.
While reflection has its uses within the framework of an active life, in solitary con-
templation, and ‘meeting with no Resistance’, the mind wastes itself.28 Hume comes
23 Cicero, De Natura Deorum and Academica, p. 601. 24 Hume, Enquiries, p. 40.

25 Hume, Enquiries, pp. 40–1.
26 Peter S. Fosl, ‘Doubt and Divinity: Cicero’s Influence on Hume’s Religious Skepticism’, Hume
Studies 20, no. 1 (1994): p. 105.
27 Matthew Fox, ‘Cicero during the Enlightenment’, The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed.
C. Steel (2013), p. 322. Emphasis added.
28 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 14.
to see that the ‘resistance’ that thought requires as a constructive counterpoint to

itself is the very practical, social activity of dialogue and conversation he finds in
Cicero. Only by acting, by communicating, is Hume able to replace the desiderata
of epistemological certainty with the utility of the virtues as a means of promoting
social well-being. Academic scepticism thus becomes a model for Hume’s attempt
to reconcile the arts of the ‘anatomist’ and the ‘painter’ in a philosophy that self-
consciously blends the dispassionate language of empiricism with the rhetoric of
sentiment and feeling. By showing Hume how to reconcile the vita contemplativa
with the vita activa, Cicero helps to heal the very wound that he once inflicted.
It is chiefly in this manner that Cicero performs a vital role in shaping both the
content and the form of Hume’s philosophy. Relieved of its apodictic status as the
mirror of nature, philosophy in Hume’s hands merges with other kinds of writing
and conversation whose forms and genres, as communicative acts, are determined
as much by the manner of their performance as by their relationship with the objects
to which they refer. Hume’s own performance as a writer is, in this regard, linked to
his insistence on the constitutive nature of custom in determining the convention-
ality of language, morals, and aesthetics. Once the association of ideas is seen to be
epistemologically continuous with the association of enlightened citizens, a social
and performative model of reason emerges as a philosophical counterdiscourse to
that which defines the subject in terms of a centred and unified consciousness.
Hume’s Ciceronian self-presentation as ‘a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from
the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation’ highlights his method of
treating philosophical works as dramatic presentations, as the performances of a
diplomat.29 As I argue in Chapter 5, the familiar essay becomes, for Hume, the genre
par excellence for this performance of philosophical diplomacy.
N AT U R E A N D T H E S TA N D A R D O F TA S T E
For Hume, virtue and character constitute the sole basis for the critique of philosophy.
The purely rational, philosophical attitude is unsustainable, he concludes, because
it is unnatural. Accordingly, barely a few pages into the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, Hume asserts that ‘nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as
most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of
these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations
and entertainments . . . . Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still
a man.’30 In advancing this claim at an early stage in the first Enquiry, Hume fore-
grounds a similar point made in the Treatise, which seeks to dispel any apprehensions
among readers that the Academic philosophy, ‘while it endeavours to limit our
enquiries to common life, should ever undermine the reasonings of common life,
and carry its doubts so far as to destroy all action, as well as speculation.’ On the
29 David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, Essays, p. 535. See also Baier, Progress, p. 27: ‘The Treatise is a
dramatic work which presents and does not merely describe a new turn in philosophy.’
30 Hume, Enquiries, p. 9.
contrary, in the face of speculation, Hume argues, ‘Nature will always maintain her
rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever.’31
Hume’s appeal to ‘nature’ should be treated with care. The issue of naturalism has
dominated Hume studies since the early twentieth century, when Norman Kemp
Smith argued that Hume’s greatest innovation was to apply the moral sense theory
of Francis Hutcheson to epistemological problems. According to Kemp Smith,
Hume thereby came ‘to hold that [Hutcheson’s view] of our moral judgements and
approval and disapproval can be extended to our beliefs regarding matters of fact
and existence, and that “logic”, morals and “criticism” may thus be brought within
the scope of the same general principles.’32 The trouble with ‘naturalism’, however,
is that it remains a highly versatile and adaptable term. Thus, although he laces
empiricism and common-sense philosophy at opposing philosophical poles, John
Skorupski considers the dispute between Hume and Reid to have been an ‘in-house
controversy among enlightened Scottish naturalists.’33 Indeed, so broad is the term
‘naturalism’, Skorupski concedes, that only by contrasting it with Kantian idealism
does it achieve any solidity or definition as a philosophical doctrine.34
It is unsurprising, then, that Kemp Smith’s account of Hume’s ‘naturalism’ has
been criticized for lacking precision. H.O. Mounce, for instance, argues that Kemp
Smith ‘confuses epistemological naturalism, the view that our knowledge depends
on what is given us by nature, with metaphysical naturalism, the view that there is
no reality apart from the natural world.’35 Metaphysical naturalism, Mounce
maintains, is associated with a scientific positivism that is quite at odds with the
naturalism of the Scottish Enlightenment, in that while the first proposes that
belief is measured by reason, the second argues that reason is ultimately grounded
in belief.36 It is difficult to disagree with Mounce on this point. For example, there
is little that is ‘naturalistic’, in the positivist sense, about Hume’s reference to scep-
ticism in the Treatise as ‘a malady, which can never be radically cur’d.’37 Statements
such as this reinforce the impression that Hume did not attempt to reconcile the
sceptical conclusions of reason and the common-sense convictions of quotidian
belief because he did not think that this was possible. Instead, as the following
passage makes plain, the best human beings can hope for is a kind of ‘double exist-
ence’ between uncertainty and activity:
Nature is obstinate, and will not quit the field, however strongly attack’d by reason;
and at the same time reason is so clear in the point, that there is no possibility of
disguising her. Not being able to reconcile these two enemies, we endeavour to set
ourselves at ease as much as possible, by successively granting to each whatever it
demands, and by feigning a double existence, where each may find something, that has
all the conditions it desires.38
31 Hume, Treatise, p. 41. 32 Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume, p. 20.
33 John Skorupski, English-Language Philosophy 1750 to 1945 (1993), p. 13.
34 Skorupski, English-Language Philosophy, p. 2.
35 H.O. Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism (1999), p. 11. 36 Mounce, Hume’s Naturalism, p. 9.
37 Hume, Treatise, p. 218. 38 Hume, Treatise, p. 215.
In his attempts to wrest Hume’s legacy from the clutches of logical positivists,
Kemp Smith overestimates Hume’s scientific positivism and downplays the drama
of our ‘double existence’ enacted at the heart of the Treatise. Unlike Reid, for whom
radical scepticism is not a philosophical problem, but ‘a certain proof of insanity,
which is not to be remedied by reasoning’, Hume never dismisses the voice of
sceptical doubt.39 It is this tension, between what Hume calls the ‘absolute and
uncontroulable necessity’ of natural belief and the philosophical conclusion that
belief rests upon no principle other than ‘custom operating upon the imagination’
that underlies what Paul Russell designates as the ‘riddle’ of Treatise.40 As Russell
puts it, the challenge for readers of the Treatise is one of how we are to ‘reconcile
Hume’s ambitions to be the Newton of the moral sciences, not only with his
skeptical principles, but with a form of “naturalism” that teaches “that reason, as
traditionally understood, has no role in human life” ’. The paradox, he maintains
(contra Kemp Smith), is that ‘both the skeptical and naturalistic dimensions of
Hume’s thought seem to be equally essential to what he is trying to achieve but are
nevertheless inherently opposed and irreconcilable.’41
Nonetheless, once the Ciceronian accent to his thought is adequately registered,
Hume can be seen to be operating both as a naturalist and as a sceptic. From this
perspective, the key moment in the Treatise passage quoted above occurs when
Hume counsels us to ‘endeavour to set ourselves at ease as much as possible’. Rather
than consistency, it is the establishment of a state of ease, of eudaemonia and bal-
ance in human life, which is Hume’s goal. What matters most in cultivating ease is
not logical argument, but an adjustment of mood and sentiment. Once this is
understood, it becomes evident that both Kemp Smith and Mounce overestimate,
albeit in different ways, the level of Hume’s commitment to conventional philosophy.
Indeed, Hume’s Academic scepticism is, strictly speaking, neither a metaphysical nor
an epistemological thesis, but a practical philosophy, defined not by a proposition
but by the attitude of epoché in which belief is neither assigned nor denied, but
suspended. Doubt itself comes to be seen as natural once the significance of what is
doubted is weighed by the scales of happiness and well-being rather than those of
certainty. Hume’s attempt to connect speculative uncertainty and common life
through ‘mitigated scepticism’ thus involves the rehabilitation of natural belief
through the process of doubting scepticism itself.42 In this way, philosophical argu-
ment gives way to a mood of doubt in which the polarities of assertion and denial
are themselves suspended. In a 1757 letter to Andrew Millar, for instance, Hume
writes of his own opinions that ‘I defend none of them positively: I only propose
39 Reid, Intellectual Powers, p. 41. 40 Hume, Treatise, pp. 183, 103.

41 Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (2008), p. 7.
Russell’s own answer to this question is that disguised irreligion, rather than epistemological scepticism,
is the key to understanding the Treatise. In this respect, Hume’s contemporaries were right about his
fundamental intentions: ‘Considered from this perspective, Hume belongs not so much in the tradition
of Descartes and Malebranche, or Locke and Berkeley, as in the “freethinking” or “atheistic” tradition
that has Hobbes at its head.’ (p. 15).
42 Hume, Enquiries, p. 162. See also Russell, Riddle, p. 221: ‘The Academic skeptic, Hume s uggests,
is a more perfect skeptic because he turns his skeptical principles on themselves.’
my Doubts.’43 As Fogelin observes, from the vantage point of Hume’s thought,

caught between scepticism and belief, ‘[w]e do not argue for mitigated skepticism;
we find ourselves in it.’44
Described in this way, Hume’s naturalism begins to look distinctly modern.
Kenneth Richman, for example, has suggested that by refashioning empirical
knowledge as a matter of sentiment, trust, and community, Hume anticipates some
of the key themes in post-analytical thought during the early and mid-twentieth
century. Hume effectively lets the air out pf epistemological scepticism, Richman
claims, thereby arriving at ‘a kind of “deflationary naturalism” (as opposed both to
epistemological naturalism (externalism) and (more generally) to scientific natur-
alism) that we in fact find full-bloodedly in the likes of [Nelson] Goodman and,
above all, Wittgenstein.’45 Nor is Richman alone in making this claim. Peter
Strawson has advanced a similar argument, likening Hume’s reliance upon ‘unavoid-
able natural convictions, commitments, or prejudices . . . ineradicably planted in
our minds by Nature’ to Wittgenstein’s account of the scaffolding of linguistic
practice that holds knowledge together.46 Thus, in Wittgenstein’s insistence both
that the most basic epistemological difficulty ‘is to realize the groundlessness of our
believing’ and that, nonetheless, ‘[m]y life consists in my being content to accept
many things’, Richman and Strawson detect a Humean intention to reduce epis-
temological controversy to the nuts and bolts of everyday communication and
sociability.47 As Strawson puts it, Hume and Wittgenstein
have in common the view that our ‘beliefs’ . . . are not grounded beliefs and at the same
time are not open to serious doubt. They are, one might say, outside our critical and
rational competence in the sense that they define . . . the area in which that competence
is exercised.48
It might be countered, nonetheless, that Hume’s adherence to psychologism—

to the language of ideas, impressions, and associations—remains too firm from a
Wittgensteinian point of view, and that although Hume would likely have agreed
with Wittgenstein that ‘[o]ur talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceed-
ings’, his own continuing talk of faculties and mental states curbs his tendency to
think of epistemological questions in social terms.49 Strawson himself notes that,
at least in the first book of the Treatise, Hume views the inductive basis of experi-
ence as a given that is open to philosophical scrutiny, or ‘connective analysis.’50 By
contrast, he notes, Wittgenstein adopts a more pragmatic approach to conceptual
43 Hume, ‘To Andrew Millar’, 3 September 1757, letter 140 of Letters, p. 265.
44 Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism, p. 150.
45 Kenneth A. Richman, ‘In Closing: The Antagonists of “The New Hume.” On the Relevance of
Goodman and Wittgenstein to the New Hume Debate’, The New Hume Debate, eds. Rupert Read and
Kenneth A. Richman (2000), p. 191.
46 P.F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. The Woodbridge Lectures 1983 (1985), p. 18.
47 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, eds.
G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (1969), pp. 24, 44.
48 Strawson, Skepticism, p. 19. 49 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 30.
50 Strawson, Skepticism, p. 25.
norms, comparing empirical truths to a riverbank that takes on the sediment of

established truths, but which also erodes, sometimes suddenly, in the face of paradigm
shifts. Thus,
[i]t might be imagined that some . . . empirical propositions, were hardened and func-
tioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and
that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones
became more fluid’; indeed, in time, ‘the river-bed of thoughts may shift.51
Only Wittgenstein, Strawson implies, is able to accommodate the possibility of

gradual change and dynamic alteration to even the most fundamental of intellec-
tual frameworks.
And yet, Hume quite clearly thinks of rational norms in terms of what Schmidt
calls ‘the historicity of human nature’, by drawing attention throughout his work
to ‘the influence of social and historical existence on human cognition, passion,
and volition.’52 He defends historicized methods of thought in his essay ‘Of the
Study of History’ as striking an appropriate balance between interestedness and
abstraction: thus, while the ‘businessman . . . is too interested in character’ and the
philosopher, who ‘contemplates characters and manners in his closet’, remains ‘cold
and unmoved’, history maintains ‘a just medium between these extremes, and places
the objects in their true point of view.’53 Given that the human ‘nature’ to which
Hume appeals is not heaven-sent but constituted by custom and habit, it follows
that natural dispositions are continuous with social norms. These norms are, in turn,
inherently temporal. Indeed, even Hume’s basic model for a simple idea is the faint
after-image of an impression; an image which, as Livingston registers, is itself ‘a
past-entailing and narrative notion.’54 Livingston concludes from this that since,
for instance, ‘no one has a full conception of red unless he has gone through the
experience of the color and its image in recollection’, experience for Hume is best
described as ‘a narrative encounter’. Consequently, Hume’s challenge to philosophical
language is that it should always be expressed ‘in terms of a tensed, narrative relation
between past and present existences.’55 Seen this way, deflationary naturalism
emerges as both social and temporal in its framing of human knowledge.
In addition to these factors, Hume insists on the constitutive role of feeling in
thought. While his naturalism leads him to deflate reason into social and historical
norms, it also encourages him to treat rationality in terms of mood, or ‘sentiment’.
This in turn affects Hume’s work stylistically as well as thematically, as his literary
practice attempts to accommodate the bifocal perspective forced upon the thinker
by a life divided between speculative reflection and everyday reasoning. Hume’s
characteristic strategy in this regard is to temporize between two moods: the serious
or philosophically earnest on one hand, and the rhetorical, deflationary, or indifferent
on the other. For example, in his Appendix to the Enquiry Concerning the Principles
51 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 15. 52 Schmidt, David Hume, p. 416.

53 Hume, Essays, p. 568. 54 Livingston, Common Life, p. 105.
55 Livingston, Common Life, p. 110.
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Sakota, 9, 61
Schools, vide Colleges
Scrolls, honorific, &c., 372-3, 451, 506
Seal, Imperial, 33, 35, 40, 42
Seng-Ko-Lin Ch’in, Prince, 15, 20, 21, 25, 28
Seymour, Admiral, 332
Shansi, Court in, 346
Yu Hsien, Governor of, 373
Shao Yu-lien, 173
Shen Chin, Reformer, 490
Sheng Hsüan-huai, 407
Sheng Pao, General, 20, 391, 484
Shensi, famine in, 105, 416
Rebellion in, 117
Shih Hsü, 458
Shimonoseki Treaty, 391
Shun-Chih, Emperor, 37, 83, 133, 146
Siege of Nanking, 68-9, 71
Su-Chou fu, 507
Silkworms, God of, 206
Small-pox, 120
Southern provinces and Reform, 169, 185, 219, 229, 253, 418,
490
Southern Viceroys, 277, 329, 359, 394-5, 506
“Spring and Autumn” Classic, 288, 318, 514
Squeezing by officials, 495, 510
Students, 178, 430, 457
Succession, Imperial, 5, 115, 119, 122, 128, 129, 132, 134, 141,
304, 381, 444, 462, 487
Sugiyama, 262
Suicide, patriotic, 134
Summer Palace, burnt by Allies, 20, 42, 389
rebuilding of, 99, 128, 168, 356, 493
Tzŭ Hsi’s life at, 198, 301, 451
Sun Chia-nai, 253, 358, 510-12
Sung Ch’ing, General, 350
Sung dynasty, 133, 143, 190, 236, 391
Sung, Eunuch, 300
Sung Po-lu, Censor, 190, 195, 208
Sung Yu-lien, 204
Sun Yat-sen, Dr., 227
Sun Yu-wen, 157
Su Shun, usurping Regent, 30 et seq., 48, 156, 496
Ta-A-Ko, vide Heir Apparent

Ta Chi, Concubine, 225
Taiping rebellion, 11, 37, 48, 64-80, 276, 321, 467, 485, 492,
513
Tai-Tsung, Empress, 37
T’ai-Yüan fu, Court at, 348, 496
Taku Forts, 264, 323, 327, 333
T’an Chung-lin, Viceroy, 245
T’ang dynasty, 141, 216, 347
Tang Shao-yi, 82, 496
T’an Su-t’ung, Reformer, 202, 245
T’an Ting-hsiang, Viceroy, 24
Tao-Kuang, Emperor, 8, 122, 184, 251, 291, 458
his widow, 11
T’ao Mo, Viceroy, 107-8
Taxation, system of, 441
Temple of Heaven, 445
“The Chinese Crisis from Within,” 2, 477
Tientsin, fighting at, 282, 289, 290, 325
Tientsin massacre, 76-7
Tien Ts’ung, Emperor, 1
Times correspondent, Peking, 82, 446, 488
Times, The, quoted, 216, 219, 389, 404-11, 471-75, 495, 501
Ting, Admiral, 99
Ting Pao-chen, 91-3
T’ing Yung, 247
Tombs, Imperial, 150, 471, 473, 487
Hsien-Feng’s, 61, 149
T’ung-Chih’s, 136
Tzŭ Hsi’s, 456
Tongking, 154, 166
Train-bands, 242-3, 248, 253
Transvaal war, 289
Treasure in Palace, 301, 347, 403
Treaties, Commercial, 111, 383
Treaty of Livadia, 502-3
of Portsmouth, 506
of Shimonoseki, 391
of Tientsin, 23, 114
Trial of Reformers, 220
Tribute, provincial, 97, 104, 359, 361, 398, 402, 452, 496
Troops, Chihli, 75, 78, 182, 197
Tsai Ch’u, Prince, 213
Tsai Feng, vide Prince Ch’un
Tsai Lan, Duke, 100, 251-2, 261-3, 270, 272, 292, 294, 360, 364
Tsai Lien, “Beileh,” 252, 282
Tsai Tsê, Duke, 431
Tsai Tun, Duke, 49
Tsai Ying, “Beileh,” 252, 282
Tsai Yüan, Prince, 21, 27, 30
Chief Regent, 36
conspiracy of, 3, 30 et seq., 212, 492
death of, 47
Ts’en Ch’un-hsüan, 101, 347-8, 355, 359, 360, 370
Tseng Kuo-ch’uan, 68
Tseng Kuo-fan, Viceroy, 11, 28, 37, 64, 80, 223, 483, 492, 502,
507
Tseng, Marquis, 64, 79, 99
Tseng Tzu, 146
Tso Tsung-t’ang, 64, 138, 140, 483, 503, 507-510
Tsungli Yamên, 42, 60, 190, 278, 334
Tuan Fang, 4, 119, 287, 454, 465, 512, 515
Tuan Hua, Prince, 21, 30 et seq., 49, 439
Tuan, Prince (Boxer), 100, 224, 251-303, 364
his wife, 343
in banishment, 365
relations with Tzŭ Hsi, 273, 283, 291, 343
son of, Heir Apparent, 253, 303-4
Tu Mu, 146
T’ung-Chih, Emperor, 35, 52, 54, 84, 115, 119, 467, 487
death of, 121, 439
funeral and burial of, 135, 138
marries A-Lu-Te, 118, 494
succession to, 130, 303, 382, 458, 461-2, 487
unborn heir of, 122
Tung Fu-hsiang, General, 261-2, 272, 281, 284-5, 288, 316,
323, 350, 362, 366, 509
T’ung Wen College, 493
T’ung Yŭan-ch’un, Censor, 38, 43
Tun, Prince, 2, 131, 251
Turkestan, 221, 229, 365, 502
Tzŭ An (Empress Dowager, of the East), 35, 55, 75, 92, 94, 118,
121, 148-9
and A-Lu-Te, 121
and Prince Kung, 93
Co-Regent with Tzŭ Hsi, 44, 475
death of, 152
tomb of, 472, 487
valedictory decree, 152
Tzŭ Hsi, Empress Dowager, (see also Yehonala)
appoints Kuang Hsü’s successor, 252, 257, 382
burial and tomb of, 150, 470-5, 515
charm of manner, 215, 478, 497
compared with Napoleon, 486
compared with Queen Elizabeth, 160, 166, 481, 498
contemplates suicide, 297
courage, 285, 487, 488
death of, 464-7, 498
despotic nature, 57, 184
diet and habits, 356, 411, 496
Empress Dowager and Co-Regent, 35, 44, 51 et seq.
extravagance, 189, 198, 228, 494
feminine vanity, 496
fits of rage, 94, 259, 265, 281, 289, 294, 300, 480, 489, 497
flies from Peking, 296-7, 340 et seq.
fond of painting, 259, 285
gentleness, 53, 239, 259, 480
her eunuchs, 81 et seq., 90, 95-6, 198, 267, 289, 300
her favourites, 91, 96, 102, 293, 364, 483
her private fortune, 81, 301, 495
her Privy Purse, 40, 45, 98, 162, 301, 398, 434
her sisters, 11, 123, 126, 179
impartiality, 231, 484
inconsistency, 257
indecision, 260, 328, 387
in retirement, 161
kindness of heart, 282, 286, 358, 478, 481, 489
last words, 466
life at summer palace, 157, 161-2, 198, 288
love of literature, 492-3
love of theatre, 88, 91, 256, 259, 356, 400, 454-5, 492
names and titles of, 13, 55, 469, 490
opium smoking, 411, 496
parentage, childhood and education, 2, 7, 8-9
penitent, 337, 383, 389, 392, 416-7, 445
personal appearance, 359
policy towards Manchus, 231
political activity, 239, 244
prestige of 469, 488
profligacy of Court, 84, 189, 203, 225, 244, 481
quarrels with Co-Regent, 94, 148-9
rebukes the Censors, 166
receives wives of foreign Ministers, 214, 290, 401, 412,
434, 495
reform policy, 375, 389, 394, 416, 420, 425
relations with Boxers, 250-300, 358, 364, 419
relations with Jung Lu, vide Jung Lu
relations with Kuang Hsü, 176, 438, 449
relations with Legations, 291, 328, 401
relations with Prince Kung, 57 et seq., 91 et seq.
relations with Prince Tuan, 278, 283, 291, 328, 343
seventieth birthday, 227
sickness of, 443, 455-6
sixtieth birthday, 167, 510
statecraft, 52, 237, 327
superstitious nature, 65, 279, 387, 409, 456, 481, 485, 487
thrifty instincts, 45, 105, 405, 434, 481, 495
Tsai Yuan conspiracy, 30 et seq.
vindictiveness, 44, 243, 305, 490
violates succession laws, 43, 126, 132, 445, 487
woman of moods, 62, 259
Vernacular Press, vide Press

Victoria, Queen, 333, 337, 448, 492
Wang Chao, Reformer, 197, 232, 449

Wang Wen-shao, 194, 247, 278, 298, 340, 342, 354, 402
Wan Li, Emperor, 1
War, with England and France (1860), 14 et seq.
of Boxers, 266
Russo-Japanese, 506
with France, 154, 166, 505
with Japan, 98, 157, 167-8, 170, 180, 249, 510
Wei Chung, Eunuch, 83
Weihaiwei, 99, 390
“Wen Ching,” 2, 477, 479
Weng T’ung-ho, 151, 156-7, 178 et seq., 233-5, 505, 510
Wen Hsi, 120
Wen Lien, 282, 289, 298, 301
Wen T’i, Censor, 194, 400
Western learning, 187, 191, 199
White Lily sect, 247, 311, 321
Winter Palace, 198, 260
Women, in the Palace, 232
not allowed with army, 485
not allowed with Imperial cortège, 45
rulers, 52, 466
Wu, Empress, 52, 189, 270, 472
Wu K’o-tu, 110 et seq., 132 et seq., 445, 461, 506
suicide of, 135, 137
Wu San-kuei, 74
Wu Ta-ch’eng, 163, 165
Wu-T’ai shan, 350
Yakoub Beg, 509

Yang Ju, 330
Yang Jui, 202, 220, 225
Yangkunu, Prince, 1
Yang Shen-hsiu, 190, 195
Yangtsze provinces, 78, 328
under Taipings, 67
Viceroys, vide Southern
Yehonala Clan, 2-4, 122, 158, 163, 166, 213, 465, 515
Yehonala, Concubine Imperial, 1 to 13 et seq., 26-7 (vide Tzŭ
Hsi)
her sisters, 11, 123, 126
Yeh, Viceroy, 12, 24
Yellow Emperor, 145
Yellow Girdles, vide Aisin Gioros
Yellow River, 163, 238, 397, 400, 509
Yellow Sedan-chair, 164
paper decrees, 243
Turban sect, 314
“Yi” Concubine, (vide Yehonala), 17, 31
Yin Chang, 384-5
Ying Nien, 366-7, 372
Ying Tsung, Emperor, 125
Yi, Prince, vide Tsai Yuan, 27, 48
“Young China,” 178, 418, 433, 476, 491
Yüan Ch’ang, 269, 270, 273, 281, 292, 294, 307-26, 377
Yüan Dynasty, 314
Yüan Shih-k’ai, 82, 171, 201, 203 et seq., 311, 334, 400, 402,
410, 429, 451, 459, 460
Yu-Ch’uan pu (Ministry of Communications), 430
Yü Hsien, 252, 254, 260, 273, 287, 291, 311, 323, 348-9, 365,
372
Yü Lu, Viceroy, 195, 257, 264, 282, 292, 297, 312, 323, 343
Yünnan, Rebellion in, 117
Transcriber’s Note: An entry for “Waiwupu” was omitted from the Index, but if it had
been included, it might have referred you to pages 339 and 482.
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,

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BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
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The Testimony of Sense Empiricism and The Essay From Hume To Hazlitt Tim Milnes Full Chapter PDF

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The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism

and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt Tim

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THE TESTIMONY OF SENSE

The Testimony of Sense

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 1

mode—the essay is viewed as extending the logical and experimental procedures of

How many things of slight probability there are, testified to by trustworthy

2 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 3

4 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 5

For Hume, the intersubjective, trusting intellect is the communicative intellect;

15 Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Polites, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century

6 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 7

the idea of a transcendentally postulated but unattainable unification of form and

HUME AND THE ‘DISEASE OF THE LEARNED’

8 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

Thought, which transported me beyond Measure [. . .].’21 Hume’s elation, however,

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 9

26 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 18.

10 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT

32 Hume, Letters, vol. 1, p. 17. 33 Hume, Treatise, p. 269.

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 11

34 Stephen, History, vol. 1, p. 2.

12 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

THE SOCIAL A PRIORI

38 Hume, Treatise, p. 265. 39 Sitter, Loneliness, p. 45.

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 13

42 Pocock, Virtue, p. 50.

14 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

As Hume comes to realize, the relations of mutuality presupposed by intersubject-

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 15

itself ‘produced intersubjectively through interaction with others and through

The rhetoric of intersubjectivity in Hume and Smith underscores the ways in

48 Guido Möllering, Trust: Reason, Routine, Reflexivity (2006), p. 112.

16 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

reconsideration leads to a pragmatic deconstruction of the thought/thing and idea/

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 17

18 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

promises no transcendental compensations: instead of symbolizing a lost wholeness,

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 19

59 Adorno, ‘Essay’, p. 161.

20 Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy

63 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 21

negative. In the tradition of the familiar essayist, it does so by acknowledging the

24 Self and Intersubjectivity

to the notion of a self defined by the possession of a single, unified consciousness.

2 Hume, Treatise, p. 41.

Self and Intersubjectivity 25

6 Baier, Progress, p. 28.

26 Self and Intersubjectivity

In pursuing varying forms of natural or anthropological transcendentalism, the

Introduction: Empiricism Made Easy 1